The Collected Stories

At Curransbridge I stood in his office above the mill, a tiny room now occupied by the man my mother had chosen to look after things, a Mr Myers. In the house I rooted through the belongings he’d left behind; I stared at photographs of him. With Flannagan and my sisters I flew the kite he’d bought me that last time he’d been to Dublin. I polished the small brass dragon that his bar-room companion had given him to give to me. ‘It’s the boy’s birthday,’ I imagined him saying in the brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and I imagined the slow movement of Mr McNamara’s hand as he drew the dragon from his pocket. It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later I should seek out Fleming’s Hotel.

‘An uncle,’ I said to the small headmaster. ‘Passing through Dublin, sir.’

‘Passing? Passing?’ He had a Home Counties accent and a hard nasal intonation. ‘Passing?’ he said again, giving the word an extra vowel sound.

‘On his way to Galway, sir. He’s in the RAF, sir. I think he’d like to see me, sir, because my father –’

‘Ah, yes, yes. Back in time for Chapel, please.’

Fleming’s Hotel, it said in the telephone directory, 21 Wheeler Street. As I cycled down from the mountains, I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there.

It was a narrow, four-storey building in a terrace with others, a bleak-looking stone façade. The white woodwork of the windows needed a coat of paint, the glass portico over the entrance doors had a dusty look. It was on this dusty glass that the name Fleming’s Hotel was picked out in white enamel letters stuck to the glass itself. I cycled past the hotel twice, glancing at the windows – a dozen of them, the four at the top much smaller than the others – and at the entrance doors. No one left or entered. I propped the bicycle against the edge of the pavement some distance away from the hotel, outside what seemed to be the street’s only shop, a greengrocer’s. There were pears in the window. I went in and bought one.

I wheeled the bicycle away from the shop and came, at the end of the street, to a canal. Slowly I ate the pear, and then I took my red-and-green school cap from my head and wheeled my bicycle slowly back to Fleming’s Hotel. I pushed open one of the entrance doors and for a split second I heard my father’s voice again, describing what I now saw: the smokiness of the low-ceilinged hall, a coal fire burning, and a high reception counter with the hotel’s register open on it, and a brass bell beside the register. There were brown leather armchairs in the hall and a brown leather bench running along one wall. Gas lamps were lit but even so, and in spite of the fact that it was four o’clock in the afternoon, the hall was dim. It was empty of other people and quiet. A tall grandfather clock ticked, the fire occasionally hissed. There was a smell of some kind of soup. It was the nicest, most comfortable hall I’d ever been in.

Beyond it, I could see another coal fire, through an archway. That was the bar where they used to sit, where for all I knew Mr McNamara was sitting now. I imagined my father crossing the hall as I crossed it myself. The bar was the same as the hall, with the same kind of leather chairs, and a leather bench and gas lamps and a low ceiling. There were net curtains pulled across the two windows, and one wall was taken up with a counter, with bottles on shelves behind it, and leather-topped stools in front of it. There was a woman sitting by the fire drinking orange-coloured liquid from a small glass. Behind the bar a man in a white jacket was reading the Irish Independent.

I paused in the archway that divided the bar from the hall. I was under age. I had no right to take a further step and I didn’t know what to do or to say if I did. I didn’t know what drink to order. I didn’t know if in the dim gaslight I looked a child.

I went to the bar and stood there. The man didn’t look up from his newspaper. Smithwick’s Ale were words on the labels of bottles: I would ask for a Smithwick’s Ale. All I wanted was to be allowed to remain, to sit down with the beer and to think about my father. If Mr McNamara did not come today he’d come another day. Frances had been right: he should have been written to. I should have written to him myself, to thank my father’s friend for his present.

‘Good evening,’ the barman said.

‘Smithwick’s, please,’ I said as casually as I could. Not knowing how much the drink might be, I placed a ten-shilling note on the bar.

‘Drop of lime in it, sir?’

‘Lime? Oh, yes. Yes, please. Thanks very much.’

‘Choppy kind of day,’ the barman said.

I took the glass and my change, and sat down as far as possible from where the woman was sitting. I sat so that I was facing both the bar and the archway, so that if Mr McNamara came in I’d see him at once. I’d have to leave at six o’clock in order to be safely back for Chapel at seven.

I finished the beer. I took an envelope out of my pocket and drew pieces of holly on the back of it, a simple art-form that Miss Sheil had taught all of us. I took my glass to the bar and asked for another Smithwick’s. The barman had a pale, unhealthy-seeming face, and wire-rimmed glasses, and a very thin neck. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said in a joky kind of voice, imitating someone. ‘Bird’s Custard,’ he said in the same joky way, ‘and Bird’s Jelly de Luxe.’ My father had mentioned this barman: he was repeating the advertisements of Radio Eireann. ‘You do want the best, don’t you?’ he said again, pushing the glass of beer towards me. By the fire, the woman made a noise, a slight, tired titter of amusement. I laughed myself, politely too.

When I returned to my armchair I found the woman was looking at me. I wondered if she could be a prostitute, alone in a hotel bar like that. A boy at school called Yeats claimed that prostitutes hung about railway stations mostly, and on quays. But there was of course no reason why you shouldn’t come across one in a bar.

Yet she seemed too quietly dressed to be a prostitute. She was wearing a green suit and a green hat, and there was a coat made of some kind of fur draped over a chair near the chair she sat on. She was a dark-haired woman with an oval face. I’d no idea what age she was: somewhere between thirty and forty, I imagined: I wasn’t good at guessing people’s ages.

The Smithwick’s Ale was having an effect on me. I wanted to giggle. How extraordinary it would be, I thought, if a prostitute tried to sell herself to me in my father’s and Mr McNamara’s hotel. After all, there was no reason at all why some prostitutes shouldn’t be quietly dressed, probably the more expensive ones were. I could feel myself smiling, holding back the giggle. Naturally enough, I thought, my father hadn’t mentioned the presence of prostitutes in Fleming’s Hotel. And then I thought that perhaps, if he’d lived, he would have told me one day, when my sisters and my mother weren’t in the room. It was the kind of thing, surely, that fathers did tell sons.

I took the envelope I’d drawn the holly on out of my pocket and read the letter it contained. They were managing, my mother said. Miss Sheil had had a dose of flu, Charlotte and Amelia wanted to breed horses, Frances didn’t know what she wanted to do. His rheumatics were slowing Flannagan down a bit in the garden. Bridget was insisting on sweeping the drawing-room chimney. It’ll be lovely at Christmas, she wrote. So nice being all together again.

The oval-faced woman put on her fur coat, and on her way from the bar she passed close to where I was sitting. She looked down and smiled at me.

‘Hills of the North, rejoice!’ we sang in chapel that night. ‘Valley and lowland, sing!’

I smelt of Smithwick’s Ale. I knew I did because as we’d stood in-line in Cloisters several other boys had remarked on it. As I sang, I knew I was puffing the smell all over everyone else. ‘Like a bloody brewery,’ Gahan Minor said afterwards.

‘… this night,’ intoned the small headmaster nasally, ‘and for ever more.’

‘Amen,’ we all replied.

Saturday night was a pleasant time. After Chapel there were two and a half hours during which you could do more or less what you liked, provided the master on duty knew where you were. You could work in the printing shop or read in the library, or take part in a debate, such as that this school is an outpost of the British Empire, or play billiards or do carpentry, or go to the model-railway club or the music-rooms. At half past nine there was some even freer time, during which the master on duty didn’t have to know where you were. Most boys went for a smoke then.

After Chapel on the Saturday night after I’d visited Fleming’s Hotel I read in the library. I read Jane Eyre, but all the time the oval face of the woman in the hotel kept appearing in my mind. It would stay there for a few seconds and then fade, and then return. Again and again, as I read Jane Eyre, she passed close to my chair in the bar of Fleming’s Hotel, and looked down and smiled at me.

The end of that term came. The Sixth Form and Remove did Macbeth on the last two nights, A. McC. P. Jackson giving what was generally regarded as a fine performance as Banquo. Someone stole the secondhand Penguin I’d bought from Grace Major to read on the train, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Drumgoole and Montgomery were found conversing in the shower-room in the middle of the night.

On the journey home I was unable to stop thinking about Fleming’s Hotel. A man in the carriage lent me a copy of Barrack Variety, but the jokes didn’t seem funny. It was at moments like these that the truth most harshly mocked me. Ever since I’d found the hotel, ever since the woman had stared at me, it had been a part of every day, and for whole nights in my long, cheerless dormitory I had been unable to sleep. My father’s voice had returned to me there, telling again the stories of his friend, and reminding me of his friend’s opinions. My father had disagreed with my mother in her view that de Valera should not hand over the ports to Churchill, preferring to share the view of his friend. At school and on the train, and most of all when I returned home, the truth made me feel ill, as though I had flu.

That Christmas morning we handed each other our presents, after we’d eaten, still observing my father’s rule. We thought of him then, they in one way, I in another. ‘Oh, my dear, how lovely!’ my mother whispered over some ornament I’d bought her in a Dublin shop. I had thrown the dragon with the green glass eyes far into a lake near the school, unable to understand how my father had ever brought it to the house, or brought bars of chocolate or tins of Jacob’s biscuits. To pass to his children beneath my mother’s eyes the gifts of another woman seemed as awful a sin as any father could commit, yet somehow it was not as great as the sin of sharing with all of us this other woman’s eccentric household, her sister and her sister’s husband, her alcoholic aunt, a maid and a dog. ‘That’s Nora McNamara,’ the barman’s voice seemed to say again at our breakfast table, and I imagined them sitting there, my father and she, in that comfortable bar, and my father listening to her talk of the house in Palmerston Road and of how she admired the English aristocracy. I watched my mother smile that Christmas morning, and I wanted to tell the truth because the truth was neat and without hypocrisy: I wanted carefully to say that I was glad my father was dead.

Instead I left the breakfast table and went to my bedroom. I wept there, and then washed my face in cold water from the jug on my wash-stand. I hated the memory of him and how he would have been that Christmas morning; I hated him for destroying everything. It was no consolation to me then that he had tried to share with us a person he loved in a way that was different from the way he loved us. I could neither forgive nor understand. I felt only bitterness that I, who had taken his place, must now continue his deception, and keep the secret of his lies and his hypocrisy.

Afternoon Dancing

Every summer since the war the two couples had gone to Southend in September, staying in Mrs Roope’s Prospect Hotel. They’d known each other since childhood: Poppy and Albert, Alice and Lenny. They’d been to the same schools, they’d all been married in the summer of 1938. They rented houses in the same street, Paper Street, SE4, Poppy and Albert Number 10, and Alice and Lenny Number 41. They were all in their mid-fifties now, and except for Poppy they’d all run to fat a bit. Len was a printer, Albert was employed by the London Electricity Board, as a cable-layer. Every night the two men had a few drinks together in the Cardinal Wolsey in Northbert Road, round the corner from Paper Street. Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, the wives went to Bingo. Alice’s children – Beryl and Ron – were now married and had children of their own. Poppy’s son, Mervyn, married also, had gone to Canada in 1969.

Poppy was very different from Alice. Alice was timid, she’d never had Poppy’s confidence. In middle age Poppy was a small, wiry woman with glasses, the worrying kind you might think to look at her, only Poppy didn’t worry at all. Poppy was always laughing, nudging Alice when they were together on a bus, drawing attention to some person who amused her. ‘Poppy Edwards, you’re a holy terror!’ Miss Curry of Tatterall Elementary School had pronounced forty years ago, and in lots of ways Poppy was a holy terror still. She’d been a slaphappy mother and was a slaphappy wife, not caring much what people thought if her child wasn’t as meticulously turned out as other children, or if Albert’s sandwiches were carelessly made. Once, back in 1941 when Albert was in the army, she’d begun to keep company with a man who was an air-raid warden, whose bad health had prevented him from joining one of the armed forces. When the war came to an end she was still involved with this man and it had seemed likely then that she and Albert would not continue to live together. Alice had been worried about it all, but then, a month before Albert was due to be demobbed, the man had been knocked down by an army truck in Holborn and had instantly died. Albert remained in ignorance of everything, even though most people in Paper Street knew just what had been going on and how close Albert had come to finding himself wifeless. In those days Poppy had been a slim, small girl in her twenties, with yellow hair that looked as though it had been peroxided but which in fact hadn’t, and light-blue mischievous eyes. Alice had been plumper, dark-haired and reliable-looking, pretty in her nice-girl way. Beryl and Ron had not been born yet.

During the war, with their two husbands serving in Italy and Africa together, Poppy had repeatedly urged Alice to let her hair down a bit, as she herself was doing with the air-raid warden. They were all going to be blown up, she argued, and if Alice thought that Lenny and Albert weren’t chancing their arms with the local talent in Italy and Africa then Alice definitely had another think coming. But Alice, even after Lenny confessed that he’d once chanced his arm through physical desperation, couldn’t bring herself to emulate the easy attitudes of her friend. The air-raid warden was always producing friends for her, men whose health wasn’t good either, but Alice chatted politely to each of them and made it clear that she didn’t wish for a closer relationship. With peace and the death of the air-raid warden, Poppy calmed down a bit, and the birth of her child eighteen months later calmed her down further.

But even so she was still the same Poppy, and in late middle age when she suggested that she and Alice should take up dancing again the idea seemed to Alice to be just like all the other ideas Poppy had had in the past: when they were seven, to take Mrs Grounds’ washing off her line and peg it up on Mrs Bond’s; when they were ten, to go to Woolworth’s with Davie Rickard and slip packets of carrots from the counter into the pockets of his jacket; at fifteen, to write anonymous letters to every teacher who’d ever had anything to do with them; at sixteen, to cut the hair of people in the row in front of them in the Regal cinema. ‘Dancing?’ Alice said. ‘Oh, Poppy, whatever would they say?’

Whatever would the two husbands say, she meant, and the other wives of Paper Street, and Beryl and Ron? Going to Bingo was one thing and quite accepted. Going dancing at fifty-four was a different kettle of fish altogether. Before their marriages they had often gone dancing: they had been taken to dance-halls on Saturday nights by the men they later married, and by other men. Every June, all four of them went dancing once or twice in Southend, even though the husbands increasingly complained that it made them feel ridiculous. But what Poppy had in mind now wasn’t the Grand Palais in Southend or the humbler floors of thirty years ago, or embarrassed husbands, or youths treading over your feet: what Poppy had in mind was afternoon dancing in a place in the West End, without the husbands or anyone else knowing a thing about it. ‘Teatime foxtrots,’ Poppy said. ‘The Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms. All the rage, they are.’ And in the end Alice agreed.

They went quite regularly to the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms, almost every Tuesday. They dressed up as they used to dress up years ago; with discretion they applied rouge and eye-shadow. Alice put on a peach-coloured corset in an effort to trim down her figure a bit, and curled the hair that had once been fair and now was grey. It looked a bit frizzy when she curled it now, the way it had never done when she was a girl, but although the sight of it sometimes depressed her she accepted the middle-aged frizziness because there was nothing she could do about it. Poppy’s hair had become rather thin on the top of her head, but she didn’t seem to notice and Alice naturally didn’t mention the fact. In middle age Poppy always kept her grey hair dyed a brightish shade of chestnut, and when Alice once read in a magazine that excessive dying eventually caused a degree of baldness she didn’t mention it either, fearing that in Poppy’s case the damage was already done. On their dancing afternoons they put on headscarves and pulled their coats carefully about them, to hide the finery beneath. Poppy wore spectacles with gold-coloured trim on the orange frames, her special-occasion spectacles she called them. They always walked quickly away from Paper Street.

In the dance-rooms they had tea on the balcony as soon as they arrived, at about a quarter to three. There was a lot of scarlet plush on the balcony, and scarlet lights. There were little round tables with paper covers on them, for convenience. When they’d had tea and Danish pastries, and a few slices of Swiss roll, they descended one of the staircases that led to the dance-floor and stood chatting by a pillar. Sometimes men came up to them and asked if one or other would like to dance. They didn’t mind if men came up or not, or at least they didn’t mind particularly. What they enjoyed was the band, usually Leo Ritz and his Band, and looking at the other dancers and the scarlet plush and having tea. Years ago they’d have danced together, just for the fun of it, but somehow they felt too old for that, at fifty-four. An elderly man with rather long grey hair once danced too intimately with Alice and she’d had to ask him to release her. Another time a middle-aged man, not quite sober, kept following them about, trying to buy them Coca-Cola. He was from Birmingham, he told them; he was in London on business and had had lunch with people who were making a cartoon film for his firm. He described the film so that they could look out for it on their television screens: it was an advertisement for wallpaper paste, which was what his firm manufactured. They were glad when this man didn’t appear the following Tuesday.

Other men were nicer. There was one who said his name was Sidney, who was lonely because his wife had left him for a younger man; and another who was delicate, a Mr Hawke. There was a silent, bald-headed man whom they both liked dancing with because he was so good at it, and there was Grantly Palmer, who was said to have won awards for dancing in the West Indies.

Grantly Palmer was a Jamaican, a man whom neither of them had agreed to dance with when he’d first asked them because of his colour. He worked as a barman in a club, he told them later, and because of that he rarely had the opportunity to dance at night. He’d often thought of changing his job since dancing meant so much to him, but bar work was all he knew. In the end they became quite friendly with Grantly Palmer, so much so that whenever they entered the dance-rooms he’d hurry up to them smiling, neat as a new pin. He’d dance with one and then the other. Tea had to wait, and when eventually they sat down to it he sat with them and insisted on paying. He was always attentive, pressing Swiss roll on both of them and getting them cigarettes from the coin machine. He talked about the club where he worked, the Rumba Rendezvous in Notting Hill Gate, and often tried to persuade them to give it a try. They giggled quite girlishly at that, wondering what their husbands would say about their attending the Rumba Rendezvous, a West Indian Club. Their husbands would have been astonished enough if they knew they went afternoon tea-dancing in the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms.

Grantly Palmer was a man of forty-two who had never married, who lived alone in a room in Maida Vale. He was a born bachelor, he told the two wives, and would not have appreciated home life, with children and all that it otherwise implied. In his youth he had played the pins, he informed them with an elaborate, white smile, meaning by this that he’d had romantic associations. He would laugh loudly when he said it. He’d been naughty in his time, he said.

Whenever he talked like that, with his eyes blazing excitedly and his teeth flashing, Alice couldn’t help thinking that Grantly Palmer was a holy terror just like Poppy had been and still in a way was, the male equivalent. She once said this to Poppy and immediately regretted it, fearing that Poppy would take offence at being likened to a black man, but Poppy hadn’t minded at all. Poppy had puffed at a tipped Embassy and had made Alice blush all over her neck by saying that in her opinion Grantly Palmer fancied her. ‘Skin and bone he’d think me,’ Poppy said. ‘Blacks like a girl they can get their teeth into.’ They were on the upper deck of a bus at the time and Poppy had laughed shrilly into her cigarette smoke, causing people to glance amusedly at her. She peered through her gold-trimmed spectacles at the people who looked at her, smiling at them. ‘My friend has a fella in love with her,’ she said to the conductor, shouting after him as he clattered down the stairs. ‘A holy terror she says he is.’

He was cheeky, Alice said, the way he always insisted on walking off the dance-floor hand in hand with you, the way he’d pinch your arm sometimes. But her complaints were half-hearted because the liberties Grantly Palmer took were never offensive: it wasn’t at all the same as having a drunk pulling you too close to him and slobbering into your hair. ‘You’ll lose him, Alice,’ Poppy cried now and again in shrill mock-alarm as they watched him paying attentions to some woman who was new to the dance-rooms. Once he’d referred to such a person, asking them if they’d noticed her, a stout woman in pink, an unmarried shorthand typist he said she was. ‘My, my,’ he said in his Jamaican drawl, shaking his head. ‘My, my.’ They never saw the unmarried shorthand typist again, but Poppy said he’d definitely been implying something, that he’d probably enticed her to his room in Maida Vale. ‘Making you jealous,’ Poppy said.

The men whom Alice and Poppy had married weren’t at all like Grantly Palmer. They were quiet men, rather similar in appearance and certainly similar in outlook. Both were of medium build, getting rather bald in their fifties, Alice’s Lenny with a moustache, Poppy’s Albert without. They were keen supporters of Crystal Palace Football Club, and neither of them, according to Poppy, knew anything about women. The air-raid warden had known about women, Poppy said, and so did Grantly Palmer. ‘He wants you to go out with him,’ she said to Alice. ‘You can see it in his eyes.’ One afternoon when he was dancing with Alice he asked her if she’d consider having a drink on her own with him, some evening when she wasn’t doing anything better. She shook her head when he said that, and he didn’t ever bring the subject up again. ‘He’s mad for you,’ Poppy said when she heard of this invitation. ‘He’s head over heels, love.’ But Alice laughed, unable to believe that Grantly Palmer could possibly be mad for a corseted grandmother of fifty-four with unmanageable grey hair.

Without much warning, Poppy died. During a summer holiday at Mrs Roope’s Prospect Hotel she’d complained of pains, though not much, because that was not her way. ‘First day back you’ll see Dr Pace,’ Albert commanded. Two months later she died one night, without waking up.

After the death Alice was at a loss. For almost fifty years Poppy had been her friend. The affection between them had increased as they’d watched one another age and as their companionship yielded more memories they could share. Their children – Alice’s Beryl and Ron, and Poppy’s Mervyn – had played together. There’d been the business of Mervyn’s emigration to Canada, and Alice’s comforting of Poppy because of it. There’d been the marriage of Ron and then of Beryl, and Poppy’s expression of Alice’s unspoken thought, that Ron’s Hilda wasn’t good enough for him, too bossy for any man really, and Poppy’s approval of Beryl’s Tony, an approval that Alice shared.

Alice had missed her children when they’d gone, just as Poppy had missed Mervyn. ‘Oh Lord, I know, dear!’ Poppy cried when Alice wept the day after Beryl’s wedding. Beryl had lived at home until then, as Ron had until his marriage. It was a help, being able to talk to Poppy about it, and Poppy so accurately understanding what Alice felt.

After Poppy’s death the silence she’d prevented when Alice’s children had grown up fell with a vengeance. It icily surrounded Alice and she found it hard to adapt herself to a life that was greyer and quieter, to days going by without Poppy dropping in or she herself dropping in on Poppy, without the cups of Maxwell House coffee they’d had together, and the cups of tea, and the biscuits and raspberry-jam sandwich cake, which Poppy had been fond of. Once, awake in the middle of the night, she found herself thinking that if Lenny had died she mightn’t have missed him so much. She hated that thought and tried, unsuccessfully, to dispel it from her mind. It was because she and Poppy had told one another everything, she kept saying to herself, the way you couldn’t really tell Lenny. But all this sounded rather lame, and when she said to herself instead that it was because she and Poppy had known one another all their lives it didn’t sound much better: she and Lenny had known one another all their lives, too. For six months after the death she didn’t go to Bingo, unable to face going on her own. It didn’t even occur to her to go afternoon dancing.

The first summer after the death, Alice and Lenny and Albert went as usual to the Prospect Hotel in Southend. There seemed to the two men to be no good reason why they shouldn’t, although when they arrived there Albert was suddenly silent and Alice could see that he was more upset than he’d imagined he would be. But after a day he was quite himself again, and when it wasn’t necessary to cheer him up any more she began to feel miserable herself. It wasn’t so much because of the death, but because she felt superfluous without Poppy. She realized gradually, and the two men realized even more gradually, that on previous holidays there had been no conversation that was general to all four of them: the men had talked to each other and so had their wives. The men did their best now to include Alice, but it was difficult and awkward.

She took to going for walks by herself, along the front and down the piers, out to the sea and back again. It was then, that summer at Southend, that Alice began to think about Grantly Palmer. It had never occurred to her before that he didn’t even know that Poppy had died, even though they’d all three been such good friends on Tuesday afternoons at the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms. She wondered what he thought, if he’d been puzzled by their sudden absence, or if he still attended the dance-rooms himself. One night in the Prospect Hotel, listening to the throaty breathing of her husband, she suddenly and quite urgently wanted to tell Grantly Palmer about Poppy’s death. She suddenly felt that it was his due, that she’d been unkind not ever to have informed him. Poppy would wish him to know, she said to herself; it was bad that she’d let down her friend in this small way. In the middle of that night, while still listening to Lenny’s breathing, she resolved to return to the Tottenham Court Dance-Rooms and found herself wondering if Leo Ritz and his Band would still be playing there.

‘Breakfasts’ve gone down a bit,’ Albert said on the way back to London, and Lenny reminded him that Mrs Roope had had a bit of family trouble. ‘Dropped Charlie Cooke, I see,’ Lenny said, referring to a Crystal Palace player. He handed Albert the Daily Mirror, open at the sports page. ‘Dare say they’ll be back to normal next year,’ Albert said, still referring to the breakfasts.

In Paper Street, a week after their return, she put on her peach-coloured corset and the dress she’d worn the first time they’d gone afternoon dancing – blue-green satin, with a small array of sequins at the shoulders and the breast. It felt more silent than ever in the house in Paper Street, because in the past Poppy used to chat and giggle in just the same way as she had as a girl, lavishly spraying scent on herself, a habit she’d always had also. Alice closed the door of Number 41 behind her and walked quickly in Paper Street, feeling guiltier than she had when the guilt could be shared. She’d tell some lie if someone she knew said she was looking smart. She’d probably say she was going to Bingo, which was what they’d both said once when Mrs Tedman had looked them up and down, as though suspecting the finery beneath. You could see that Mrs Tedman hadn’t believed that they were going to Bingo, but Poppy said it didn’t matter what Mrs Tedman thought. It was all a bit frightening without Poppy, but then everything was something else without Poppy, dull or silent or frightening. Alice caught a bus, and at a quarter to three she entered the dance-rooms.

‘Well, well!’ Grantly Palmer said, smiling his bright smile. ‘Well, well, stranger lady!’

‘Hullo, Mr Palmer.’

‘Oh, child, child!’

‘Hullo, Grantly.’

It had always been a joke, the business of Christian names between the three of them. ‘Alice and Poppy!’ he’d said the first time they’d had tea together. ‘My, my, what charmin’ names!’ They’d just begun to use his own Christian name when Poppy had died. Funny name, Grantly,’ Poppy had remarked on the bus after he’d first told them, but soon it had become impossible to think of him as anything else.

‘Where’s Poppy, dear?’

‘Poppy died, Grantly.’

She told him all about it, about last year’s holiday at Southend and the development of the illness and then the funeral. ‘My God!’ he said, staring into her eyes. ‘My God, Alice.’

The band was playing ‘Lullaby of Broadway’: middle-aged women, in twos or on their own, stood about, sizing up the men who approached them, in the same expert way as she and Poppy had sized men up in their time. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Grantly Palmer said.

They had tea and Swiss-roll slices and Danish pastries. They talked about Poppy. ‘Was she happy?’ he asked. And Alice said her friend had been happy enough.

In silence on the balcony they watched the dancers rotating below them. He wasn’t going to dance with her, she thought, because Poppy had died, because the occasion was a solemn one. She was aware of disappointment. Poppy had been dead for more than a year, after all.

‘It’s a horrible thing,’ he said. ‘A friend dying. In the prime of her life.’

‘I miss her.’

‘Of course, Alice.’

He reached across the tea-table and seized one of her hands. He held it for a moment and then let it go. It was a gesture that reminded her of being a girl. On television men touched girls’ hands in that way. How nice, she suddenly thought, the chap called Ashley was in Gone with the Wind. She’d seen the film with Poppy, revived a few years back, Leslie Howard playing Ashley.

He went away and returned with another pot of tea and a plate of Swiss-roll slices. Leo Ritz and his Band were playing ‘September Love’.

‘I thought I’d never lay eyes on you again, Alice.’

He regarded her solemnly. He didn’t smile when he said that the very first time he’d met her he’d considered her a very nice person. He was wearing a suit made of fine, black corduroy. His two grey hands were gripping his teacup, nursing it.

‘I came back to tell you about Poppy, Grantly.’

‘I kept on hoping you’d come back. I kept on thinking about you.’ He nodded, lending emphasis to this statement. Without drinking from it, he placed his teacup on the table and pulled his chair in a bit, nearer to hers. She could feel some part of his legs, an ankle-bone it felt like. Then she felt one of his hands, beneath the table, touching her right knee and then touching the left one.

She didn’t move. She gazed ahead of her, feeling through the material of her dress the warmth of his flesh. The first time they’d had tea with him he’d told a joke about three Jamaican clergymen on a desert island and she and Poppy had laughed their heads off. Even when it had become clear to Poppy and herself that what he was after was sex and not love, Poppy had still insisted that she should chance her arm with him. It was as though Poppy wanted her to go out with Grantly Palmer because she herself had gone out with the air-raid warden.

His hand remained on her left knee. She imagined it there, the thin grey hand on the blue satin material of her dress. It moved, pushing back the satin, the palm caressing, the tip of the thumb pressing into her thigh.

She withdrew her leg, smiling to cover the unfriendliness of this decision. She could feel warmth all over her neck and her cheeks and around her eyes. She could feel her eyes beginning to water. On her back and high up on her forehead, beneath the grey frizz of her hair, she felt the moisture of perspiration.

He looked away from her. ‘I always liked you, Alice,’ he said. ‘You know? I liked you better than Poppy, even though I liked Poppy too.’

It was different, a man putting his hand on your knee: it was different altogether from the natural intimacy of dancing, when anything might have been accidental. She wanted to go away now; she didn’t want him to ask her to dance with him. She imagined him with the pink woman, fondling her knees under a table before taking her to Maida Vale. She saw herself in the room in Maida Vale, a room in which there were lilies growing in pots, although she couldn’t remember that he’d ever said he had lilies. There was a thing like a bedspread hanging on one of the walls, brightly coloured, red and blue and yellow. There was a gas-fire glowing and a standard lamp such as she’d seen in the British Home Stores, and a bed with a similar brightly coloured cloth covering it, and a table and two upright chairs, and a tattered green screen behind which there’d be a sink and a cooking stove. In the room he came to her and took her coat off and then undid the buttons of her dress. He lifted her petticoat over her head and unhooked her peach-coloured corset and her brassière.

‘Will you dance with me, Alice?’

She shook her head. Her clothes were sticking to her now. Her armpits were clammy.

‘Won’t you dance, dear?’

She said she’d rather not, not today. Her voice shivered and drily crackled. She’d just come to tell him about Poppy, she said again.

‘I’d like to be friends with you, Alice. Now that Poppy has –’

‘I have to go home, Grantly. I have to.’

‘Don’t go, darling.’

His hands had crossed the table again. They held her wrists; his teeth and his eyes flashed at her, though not in a smiling way. She shouldn’t have come, her own voice kept protesting in the depths of her mind, like an echo. It had all been different when there were three of them, all harmless flirtation, with Poppy giggling and pretending, just fun.

There was excitement in his face. He released her wrists, and again, beneath the table, she felt one of his legs against hers. He pushed his chair closer to the table, a hand moved on her thigh again.

‘No, no,’ she said.

‘I looked for you. I don’t know your other name, you know. I didn’t know Poppy’s either. I didn’t know where you lived. But I looked for you, Alice.’

He didn’t say how he’d looked for her, but repeated that he had, nodding emphatically.

‘I thought if I found you we’d maybe have a drink one night. I have records in my room I’d like you to hear, Alice. I’d like to have your opinion.’

‘I couldn’t go to your room –’

‘It would be just like sitting here, Alice. It would be quite all right.’

‘I couldn’t ever, Grantly.’

What would Beryl and Ron say if they could see her now, if they could hear the conversation she was having, and see his hand on her leg? She remembered them suddenly as children, Beryl on the greedy side yet refusing to eat fish in any shape or form, Ron having his nails painted with Nail-Gro because he bit them. She remembered the birth of Ron and how it had been touch and go because he’d weighed so little. She remembered the time Beryl scalded herself on the electric kettle and how Lenny had rung 999 because he said it would be the quickest way to get attention. She remembered the first night she’d been married to Lenny, taking her clothes off under a wrap her mother had given her because she’d always been shy about everything. All she had to do, she said to herself, was to stand up and go.

His hands weren’t touching her any more. He moved his body away from hers, and she looked at him and saw that the excitement had gone from his face. His eyes had a dead look. His mouth had a melancholy twist to it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘I fancied you that first day, Alice. I always fancied you, Alice.’

He was speaking the truth to her and it was strange to think of it as the truth, even though she had known that in some purely physical way he desired her. It was different from being mad for a person, and yet she felt that his desiring her was just as strange as being mad for her. If he didn’t desire her she’d have been able to return to the dance-rooms, they’d have been able to sit here on the balcony, again and again, she telling him more about Poppy and he telling her more about himself, making one another laugh. Yet if he didn’t desire her he wouldn’t want to be bothered with any of that.

‘Can’t fancy black girls,’ he said, with his head turned well away from her. ‘White women, over sixty if it’s possible. Thirteen stone or so. That’s why I go to the dance-rooms.’ He turned to face her and gazed morosely at her eyes. ‘I’m queer that way,’ he said. ‘I’m a nasty kind of black man.’

She could feel sickness in her stomach, and the skin of her back, which had been so damp with sweat, was now cold. She picked up her handbag and held it awkwardly for a moment, not knowing what to say. ‘I must go,’ she said eventually, and her legs felt shaky when she stood on them.

He remained at the table, all his politeness gone. He looked bitter and angry and truculent. She thought he might insult her. She thought he might shout loudly at her in the dance-rooms, calling her names and abusing her. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything at all to her. He sat there in the dim, tinted light, seeming to slump from one degree of disappointment to a deeper one. He looked crude and pathetic. He looked another person.

Again, as she stood there awkwardly, she thought about the room in Maida Vale, which she’d furnished with lilies and brightly coloured cloths. Again his grey hands undid her corset and her brassière, and just for a moment it seemed that there wouldn’t have been much wrong in letting him admire her in whatever way he wanted to. It was something that would disgust people if they knew; Beryl and Ron would be disgusted, and Lenny and Albert naturally enough. Grantly Palmer would disgust them, and she herself, a grandmother, would disgust them for permitting his attentions. There was something wrong with Grantly Palmer, they’d all say: he was sick and dirty, as he even admitted himself. Yet there were always things wrong with people, things you didn’t much care for and even were disgusted by, like Beryl being greedy and Ron biting his nails, like the way Lenny would sometimes blow his nose without using a handkerchief or a tissue. Even Poppy hadn’t been perfect: on a bus it had sometimes been too much, her shrillness and her rushy ways, so clearly distasteful to other people sitting there.

Alice wanted to tell Grantly Palmer all that. Desperately she tried to form an argument in her mind, a conversation with herself that had as its elements the greediness of her daughter and her son’s bitten nails and her husband clearing the mucus from his nose at the sink, and she herself agreeing to be the object of perversion. But the elements would not connect, and she felt instinctively that she could not transform them into coherent argument. The elements spun dizzily in her mind, the sense she sought from them did not materialize.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, knowing he would not answer. He was ashamed of himself; he wanted her to go. ‘Goodbye,’ she said again. ‘Goodbye, Grantly.’

She moved away from him, forcing herself to think about the house in Paper Street, about entering it and changing her clothes before Lenny returned. She’d bought two chops that morning and there was part of a packet of frozen beans in the fridge. She saw herself peeling potatoes at the sink, but at the same time she could feel Grantly Palmer behind her, still sitting at the table, ashamed when he need not be. She felt ashamed herself for having tea with him, for going to see him when she shouldn’t, just because Poppy was dead and there was no one else who was fun to be with.

Leo Ritz and his Band were playing ‘Scatterbrain’ as she left the dance-rooms. The middle-aged dancers smiled as they danced, some of them humming the tune.

Last Wishes

In the neighbourhood Mrs Abercrombie was a talking point. Strangers who asked at Miss Dobbs’ Post Office and Village Stores or at the Royal Oak were told that the wide entrance gates on the Castle Cary road were the gates to Rews Manor, where Mrs Abercrombie lived in the past, with servants. No one from the village except old Dr Ripley and a window-cleaner had seen her since 1947, the year of her husband’s death. According to Dr Ripley, she’d become a hypochondriac.

But even if she had, and in spite of her desire to live as a recluse, Mrs Abercrombie continued to foster the grandeur that made Rews Manor, nowadays, seem old-fashioned. Strangers were told that the interior of the house had to be seen to be believed. The staircase alone, in white rose-veined marble, was reckoned to be worth thousands; the faded carpets had come from Persia; all the furniture had been in the Abercrombie family for four or five generations. On every second Sunday in the summer the garden was open to visitors and the admission charges went to the Nurses.

Once a week Plunkett, the most important of Mrs Abercrombie’s servants, being her butler, drove into the village and bought stamps and cigarettes in the post office and stores. It was a gesture more than anything else, Miss Dobbs considered, because the bulk of the Rews Manor shopping was done in one or other of the nearby towns. Plunkett was about fifty, a man with a sandy appearance who drove a pre-war Wolseley and had a pleasant, easy-going smile. The window-cleaner reported that there was a Mrs Plunkett, a uniformed housemaid, but old Dr Ripley said the uniformed maid was a person called Tindall. There were five servants at Rews Manor, Dr Ripley said, if you counted the two gardeners, Mr Apse and Miss Bell, and all of them were happy. He often repeated that Mrs Abercrombie’s servants were happy, as though making a point: they were pleasant people to know, he said, because of their contentment. Those who had met Plunkett in the village agreed, and strangers who had come across Mr Apse and Miss Bell in the gardens of Rews Manor found them pleasant also, and often envied them their dispositions.

In the village it was told how there’d always been Abercrombies at Rews Manor, how the present Mrs Abercrombie’s husband had lived there alone when he’d inherited it – until he married at forty-one, having previously not intended to marry at all because he suffered from a blood disease that had killed his father and his grandfather early in their lives. It was told how the marriage had been a brief and a happy one, and how there’d been no children. Mrs Abercrombie’s husband had died within five years and had been buried in the grounds of Rews Manor, near the azaleas.

‘So beautifully kept, the garden,’ visitors to the neighbourhood would marvel. ‘That gravel in front, not a stone out of place! Those lawns and rose-bushes!’ And then, intrigued by the old-fashioned quality of the place, they’d hear the story of this woman whose husband had inopportunely died, who existed now only in the world of her house and gardens, who lived in the past because she did not care for the present. People wove fantasies around this house and its people; to those who were outside it, it touched on fantasy itself. It was real because it was there and you could see it, because you could see the man called Plunkett buying stamps in the post office, but its reality was strange, as exotic as a coloured orchid. In the 1960s and 1970s, when life often had a grey look, the story of Rews Manor cheered people up, both those who told it and those who listened. It created images in minds and it affected imaginations. The holidaymakers who walked through the beautifully kept garden, through beds of begonias and roses, among blue hydrangeas and potentilla and witch-hazel and fuchsia, were grateful. They were grateful for the garden and for the story that went with it, and later they told the story themselves, with conjectured variations.

At closer quarters, Rews Manor was very much a world of its own. In 1947, at the time of Mr Abercrombie’s death, Mr Apse, the gardener, worked under the eighty-year-old Mr Marriott, and when Mr Marriott died Mrs Abercrombie promoted Mr Apse and advertised for an assistant. There seemed no reason why a woman should not be as suitable as a man and so Miss Bell, being the only applicant, was given the post. Plunkett had also been advertised for when his predecessor, Stubbins, had become too old to carry on. The housemaid, Tindall, had been employed a few years after the arrival of Plunkett, as had Mrs Pope, who cooked.

The servants all lived in, Mr Apse where he had always lived, in a room over the garage, Miss Bell next door to him. The other three had rooms in a wing of the house which servants, in the days when servants were more the thing, had entirely occupied. They met for meals in the kitchen and sometimes they would sit there in the evenings. The room which once had been the servants’ sitting-room had a dreariness about it: in 1956 Plunkett moved the television set into the kitchen.

Mr Apse was sixty-three now and Miss Bell was forty-five. Mrs Pope was fifty-nine, Tindall forty-three. Plunkett, reckoned in the village to be about fifty, was in fact precisely that. Plunkett, who had authority over the indoor servants and over Mr Apse and Miss Bell when they were in the kitchen, had at the time of Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement held a position in a nouveau-riche household in Warwickshire. He might slowly have climbed the ladder and found himself, when death or age had made a gap for him, in charge of its servants. He might have married and had children. He might have found himself for the rest of his life in the butler’s bungalow, tucked out of sight on the grounds, growing vegetables in his spare time. But for Plunkett these prospects hadn’t seemed quite right. He didn’t want to marry, nor did he wish to father children. He wanted to continue being a servant because being a servant made him happy, yet the stuffiness of some households was more than he could bear and he didn’t like having to wait for years before being in charge. He looked around, and as soon as he set foot in Rews Manor he knew it was exactly what he wanted, a small world in which he had only himself to blame if the food and wine weren’t more than up to scratch. He assisted Mrs Abercrombie in her choosing of Mrs Pope as cook, recognizing in Mrs Pope the long-latent talents of a woman who sought the opportunity to make food her religion. He also assisted in the employing of Tindall, a fact he had often recalled since, on the nights he spent in her bed.

Mrs Pope had cooked in a YWCA until she answered the advertisement. The raw materials she was provided with had offered her little opportunity for the culinary experiments she would have liked to attempt. For twenty years she had remained in the kitchens of the YWCA because her husband, now dead, had been the janitor. In the flat attached to the place she had brought up two children, a boy and a girl, both of them now married. She’d wanted to move to somewhere nicer when Winnie, the girl, had married a traveller in stationery, but her husband had refused point-blank, claiming that the YWCA had become his home. When he died, she hadn’t hesitated.

Miss Bell had been a teacher of geography, but had been advised for health considerations to take on outdoor work. Having always enjoyed gardening and knowing quite a bit about it, she’d answered Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement in The Times. She’d become used to living in, in a succession of boarding-schools, so that living in somewhere else suited her quite well. Mr Apse was a silent individual, which suited her also. For long hours they would work side by side in the vegetable garden or among the blue hydrangeas and the azaleas that formed a shrubbery around the house, neither of them saying anything at all.

Tindall had worked as a packer in a frozen-foods factory. There’d been trouble in her life in that the man she’d been engaged to when she was twenty-two, another employee in the factory, had made her pregnant and had then, without warning, disappeared. He was a man called Bert Fask, considerate in every possible way, quiet and seemingly reliable. Everyone said she was lucky to be engaged to Bert Fask and she had imagined quite a happy future. ‘Don’t matter a thing,’ he said when she told him she was pregnant, and he fixed it that they could get married six months sooner than they’d intended. Then he disappeared. She’d later heard that he’d done the same thing with other girls, and when it became clear that he didn’t intend to return she began to feel bitter. Her only consolation was the baby, which she still intended to have even though she didn’t know how on earth she was going to manage. She loved her unborn child and she longed for its birth so that she herself could feel loved again. But the child, two months premature, lived for only sixteen hours. That blow was a terrible one, and it was when endeavouring to get over it that she’d come across Mrs Abercrombie’s advertisement, on a page of a newspaper that a greengrocer had wrapped a beetroot in. That chance led her to a contentment she hadn’t known before, to a happiness that was different only in detail from the happinesses of the other servants.

On the morning July 12th 1974, a Friday, Tindall knocked on Mrs Abercrombie’s bedroom door at her usual time of eight forty-five. She carried into the room Mrs Abercrombie’s breakfast tray and the morning mail, and placed the tray on the Queen Anne table just inside the door. She pulled back the bedroom’s six curtains. ‘A cloudy day,’ she said.

Mrs Abercrombie, who had been reading Butler’s Lives of the Saints, extinguished her bedside light. She remarked that the wireless the night before had predicted that the weather would be unsettled: rain would do the garden good.

Tindall carried the tray to the bed, placed it on the mahogany bed-table and settled the bed-table into position. Mrs Abercrombie picked up her letters. Tindall left the room.

Letters were usually bills, which were later passed to Plunkett to deal with. Plunkett had a housekeeping account, into which a sum of money was automatically transferred once a month. Mrs Abercrombie’s personal requirements were purchased from this same account, negligible since she had ceased to buy clothes. It was Tindall who noticed when she needed a lipstick refill or lavender-water or more hairpins. Tindall made a list and handed it to Plunkett. For years Mrs Abercrombie herself hadn’t had the bother of having to remember, or having to sign a cheque.

This morning there was the monthly account from the International Stores and one from the South Western Electricity Board. The pale brown envelopes were identification enough: she put them aside unopened. The third envelope contained a letter from her solicitors about her will.

In the kitchen, over breakfast, the talk turned to white raspberries. Mr Apse said that in the old days white raspberries had been specially cultivated in the garden. Tindall, who had never heard of white raspberries before, remarked that the very idea of them gave her the creeps. ‘More flavour really, ‘Miss Bell said quietly.

Plunkett, engrossed in the Daily Telegraph, did not say anything. Mrs Pope said she’d never had white raspberries and would like to try them. She’d be more than grateful, she added, if Mr Apse could see his way to putting in a few canes. But Mr Apse had relapsed into his more familiar mood of silence. He was a big man, slow of movement, with a brown bald head and tufts of grey hair about his ears. He ate bacon and mushrooms and an egg in a slow and careful manner, occasionally between mouthfuls drinking tea. Miss Bell nodded at Mrs Pope, an indication that Mr Apse had heard the request about the raspberries and would act upon it.

‘Like slugs they sound,’ Tindall said.

Miss Bell, who had small tortoiseshell glasses and was small herself, with a weather-beaten face, said that they did not taste like slugs. Her father had grown white raspberries, her mother had made a delicious dish with them, mixing them with loganberries and baking them with a meringue top. Mrs Pope nodded. She’d read a recipe like that once, in Mrs Beeton it might have been; she’d like to try it out.

In the Daily Telegraph Plunkett read that there was a strike of television technicians and a strike of petrol hauliers. The sugar shortage was to continue and there was likely to be a shortage of bread. He sighed without making a sound. Staring at print he didn’t feel like reading, he recalled the warmth of Tindall’s body the night before. He glanced round the edge of the newspaper at her: there was a brightness in her eyes, which was always there the morning after he’d visited her in bed. She’d wept twice during the four hours he’d spent: tears of fulfilment he’d learnt they were, but all the same he could never prevent himself from comforting her. Few words passed between them when they came together in the night; his comforting consisted of stroking her hair and kissing her damp cheeks. She had narrow cheeks, and jet-black hair which she wore done up in a knot during the day but which tumbled all over the pillows when she was in bed. Her body was bony, which he appreciated. He didn’t know about the tragedy in her life because she’d never told him; in his eyes she was a good and efficient servant and a generous woman, very different from the sorrowful creature who’d come looking for employment twenty years ago. She had never once hinted at marriage, leaving him to deduce that for her their arrangement was as satisfactory as it was for him.

‘Moussaka for dinner,’ Mrs Pope said, rising from the breakfast table. ‘She asked for it special.’

‘No wonder, after your last one,’ Miss Bell murmured. The food at the schools where she’d taught geography had always been appalling: grey-coloured mince and soup that smelt, huge sausage-rolls for Sunday tea, cold scrambled egg.

‘Secret is, cook it gently,’ Mrs Pope said, piling dishes into the sink. ‘That’s all there’s to it if you ask me.’

‘Oh no, no,’ Miss Bell murmured, implying that there was a great deal more to moussaka than that. She carried her own dishes to the sink. Mrs Pope had a way with moussaka, she added in her same quiet way, which was why Mrs Abercrombie had asked for it again.

Tindall chewed her last corner of toast and marmalade. She felt just slightly sore, pleasantly so, as she always did after a visit from Plunkett. Quite remarkable he sometimes was in the middle of the night, yet who’d have thought he’d know a thing about any of it?

Mr Apse left the kitchen and Miss Bell followed him. Tindall carried her dishes to the sink and assisted Mrs Pope with the washing up. At the table Plunkett lit his first cigarette of the day, lingering over a last cup of tea.

As she did every morning after breakfast, Mrs Abercrombie recalled her husband’s death. It had taken place on a fine day in March, a day with a frost in the early morning and afterwards becoming sunny, though still cold. He’d had a touch of flu but was almost better; Dr Ripley had suggested his getting up in time for lunch. But by lunchtime he was dead, with the awful suddenness that had marked the deaths of his father and his grandfather, nothing to do with flu at all. She’d come into their bedroom, with the clothes she’d aired for him to get up into.

Mrs Abercrombie was sixty-one now; she’d been thirty-four at the time of the death. Her life for twenty-seven years had been a memorial to her brief marriage, but death had not cast unduly gloomy shadows, for after the passion of her sorrow there was some joy at least in her sentimental memories. Her own death preoccupied her now: she was going to die because with every day that passed she felt more weary. She felt herself slipping away and even experienced slight pains in her body, as if some ailment had developed in order to hurry her along. She’d told Dr Ripley, wondering if her gallstones were playing up, but Dr Ripley said there was nothing the matter with her. It didn’t comfort her that he said it because she didn’t in the least mind dying. She had a belief that after death she would meet again the man who had himself died so abruptly, that the interrupted marriage would somehow continue. For twenty-seven years this hope had been the consolation that kept her going. That and the fact that she had provided a home for Mr Apse and Miss Bell, and Mrs Pope and Tindall and Plunkett, all of whom had grown older with her and had shared with her the beauty of her husband’s house.

‘I shall not get up today,’ she murmured on the morning of July 12th. She did not, and in fact did not ever again get up.

They were thrown into confusion. They stood in the kitchen looking at one another, only Plunkett looking elsewhere, at the Aga that for so long now had been Mrs Pope’s delight. No one had expected Mrs Abercrombie to die, having been repeatedly assured by Dr Ripley that there was nothing the matter with her. The way she lived, so carefully and so well looked after, there had seemed no reason why she shouldn’t last for another twenty years at the very least, into her eighties. In bed at night, on the occasions when he didn’t visit Tindall’s bed, Plunkett had worked out that if Mrs Abercrombie lived until she was eighty, Miss Bell would be sixty-four and Mrs Pope seventy-eight. Tindall, at sixty-two, would presumably be beyond the age of desire, as he himself would no doubt be, at sixty-nine. Mr Apse, so grizzled and healthy did he sometimes seem, might still be able to be useful in the garden, at eighty-two. It seemed absurd to Plunkett on the morning of July 12th that Mrs Abercrombie had died twenty years too soon. It also seemed unfair.

It seemed particularly unfair because, according to the letter which Mrs Abercrombie had that morning received from her solicitors, she had been in the process of altering her will. Mrs Abercrombie had once revealed to Plunkett that it had been her husband’s wish, in view of the fact that there were no children, that Rews Manor should eventually pass into the possession of a body which was engaged in the study of rare grasses. It was a subject that had interested him and which he had studied in considerable detail himself. ‘There’ll be legacies of course,’ Mrs Abercrombie had reassured Plunkett, ‘for all of you.’ She’d smiled when she’d said that and Plunkett had bowed and murmured in a way that, years ago, he’d picked up from Hollywood films that featured English butlers.

But in the last few weeks Mrs Abercrombie had apparently had second thoughts. Reading between the lines of the letter from her solicitors, it was clear to Plunkett that she’d come to consider that legacies for her servants weren’t enough. We assume your wish to be, the letter read, that after your death your servants should remain in Rews Manor, retaining the house as it is and keeping the gardens open to the public. That this should be so until such time as Mr Plunkett should have reached retirement age, i.e. sixty-five years or, in the event of Mr Plunkett’s previous death, that this arrangement should continue until the year 1990. At either time, the house and gardens should be disposed of as in your current will and the servants remaining should receive the legacies as previously laid down. We would be grateful if you would confirm at your convenience that we are correct in this interpretation of your wishes: in which case we will draw up at once the necessary papers. But her convenience had never come because she had left it all too late. With the typewritten sheet in his hand, Plunkett had felt a shiver of bitterness. He’d felt it again, with anger, when he’d looked at her dead face.

‘Grass,’ he said in the kitchen. ‘They’ll be studying grass here.’

The others knew what he was talking about. They, like he, believing that Mrs Abercrombie would live for a long time yet, had never paused to visualize Rews Manor in that far-off future. They did so now, since the future was bewilderingly at hand. Contemporary life closed in upon the house and garden that had belonged to the past. They saw the house without its furniture since such furniture would be unsuitable in a centre for the studying of grasses. They saw, in a vague way, men in shirtsleeves, smoking pipes and carrying papers. Tindall saw grasses laid out for examination on a long trestle table in the hall. Mr Apse saw roses uprooted from the garden, the blue hydrangeas disposed of, and small seed-beds, neatly laid out, for the cultivation of special grass. Miss Bell had a vision of men with a bulldozer, but she could not establish their activity with more precision. Mrs Pope saw caterers’ packs on the kitchen table and in the cold room and the store cupboards: transparent plastic bags containing powdered potatoes in enormous quantities, fourteen-pound tins of instant coffee, dried mushrooms and dried all-purpose soup. Plunkett saw a laboratory in the drawing-room.

‘I must telephone Dr Ripley,’ Plunkett said, and the others thought, but did not say it, that it was too late for Dr Ripley to be of use.

‘You have to,’ Plunkett said, ‘when a person dies.’

He left the kitchen, and Mrs Pope began to make coffee. The others sat down at the table, even though it was half past eleven in the morning. There were other houses, Tindall said to herself, other country houses where life would be quiet and more agreeable than life in a frozen-foods firm. And yet other houses would not have him coming to her bedroom, for she could never imagine his suggesting that they should go somewhere together. That wasn’t his way; it would be too binding, too formal, like a proposal of marriage. And she wouldn’t have cared to be Mrs Plunkett, for she didn’t in the least love him.

‘Poor thing,’ Mrs Pope said, pouring her boiling water on to the coffee she had ground, and for a moment Tindall thought the reference was to her.

‘Yes,’ Miss Bell whispered, ‘poor old thing.’ She spoke in a kind way, but her words, sincerely meant, did not sound so in the kitchen. Somewhere in the atmosphere that the death had engendered there was resentment, a reflection of the bitterness it had engendered in Plunkett. There was a feeling that Mrs Abercrombie, so considerate in her lifetime, had let them down by dying. Even while she called her a poor old thing, Miss Bell wondered what she should do now. Many employers might consider the idea of a woman gardener eccentric, and certainly other men, more set in their ways than Mr Apse, mightn’t welcome a female assistant.

Mrs Pope thought along similar lines. You became used to a place, she was reflecting as she poured the coffee into cups, and there’d be few other places where you could cook so grandly for a single palate, where you were appreciated every day of your life. ‘Bloody inedible,’ she’d heard a girl exclaim in a corridor of the YWCA, referring to carefully poached haddock in a cream sauce.

‘The doctor’ll be here at twelve,’ Plunkett sombrely announced, re-entering the kitchen from the back hall. ‘I left a message; I didn’t say she’d died.’

He sat down at the table and waited while Mrs Pope filled his coffee-cup. Tindall placed the jug of hot milk beside him and for a moment the image of her fingers on the flowered surface of the china caused him to remember the caressing of those fingers the night before. He added two lumps of sugar and poured the milk. He felt quite urgent about Tindall, which he never usually did at half past eleven on a morning after. He put it down to the upset of the death, and the fact that he was idle when normally on a Friday morning he’d be going through the stores with Mrs Pope.

‘Doctor’ll sign a death warrant,’ Mrs Pope said. ‘There’ll be the funeral.’

Plunkett nodded. Mrs Abercrombie had a cousin in Lincolnshire and another in London, two old men who once, twelve years ago, had spent a weekend in Rews Manor. Mrs Abercrombie hadn’t corresponded with them after that, not caring for them, Plunkett imagined. The chances were they were dead by now.

‘No one much to tell,’ Mrs Pope said, and Miss Bell mentioned the two cousins. He’d see if they were alive, Plunkett said.

It was while saying that, and realizing as he said it the pointlessness of summoning these two ancient men to a funeral, that he had his idea: why should not Mrs Abercrombie’s last wishes be honoured, even if she hadn’t managed to make them legal? The idea occurred quickly and vividly to him, and immediately he regretted his telephoning of Dr Ripley. But as soon as he regretted it he realized that the telephoning had been essential. Dr Ripley was a line of communication with the outside world and had been one for so long that it would seem strange to other people if a woman, designated a hypochondriac, failed to demand as regularly as before the attentions of her doctor. It would seem stranger still to Dr Ripley.

Yet there was no reason why Mrs Abercrombie should not be quietly buried beside the husband she had loved, where she was scheduled to be buried anyway. There was no reason that Plunkett could see why the household should not then proceed as it had in the past. The curtains of the drawing room would be drawn when next the window-cleaner came, Dr Ripley would play his part because he’d have no option.

‘I see no harm in it,’ Plunkett said.

‘In what?’ Mrs Pope inquired, and then, speaking slowly to break the shock of his idea, he told them. He told them about the letter Mrs Abercrombie had received that morning from her solicitors. He took it from an inside pocket and showed it to them. They at first thought it strange that he should be carrying Mrs Abercrombie’s correspondence on his person, but as the letter passed among them, they understood.

‘Oh no,’ Miss Bell murmured, her small brown face screwed up in distaste. Mrs Pope shook her head and said she couldn’t be a party to deception. Mr Apse did not say anything. Tindall half shook her head.

‘It was what she clearly wished,’ Plunkett explained. ‘She had no intention of dying until she’d made this stipulation.’

‘Death waits for no one’s wishes,’ Mr Apse pointed out in a ponderous voice.

‘All we are doing,’ Plunkett said, ‘is to make it wait.’

‘But there’s Dr Ripley,’ Tindall said, and Mrs Pope added that a doctor couldn’t ever lend himself to anything shady. It surprised Mrs Pope that Plunkett had made such an extraordinary suggestion, just as it surprised Miss Bell. Tindall and Mr Apse were surprised also, but more at themselves for thinking that what Plunkett was suggesting was only a postponement of the facts, not a suppression.

‘But, Plunkett, what exactly are you wanting to do?’ Mrs Pope cried out, suddenly shrill.

‘She must be buried as she said. She spoke to us all of it, that she wished to be laid down by Mr Abercrombie in the garden.’

‘But you have to inform the authorities,’ Miss Bell whispered, and Mrs Pope, still shrill, said there had to be a coffin and a funeral.

‘I’d make a coffin,’ Plunkett replied swiftly. ‘There’s the timber left over from the drawing-room floorboards. Beautiful oak, plenty of it.’

They knew he could. They’d seen him making other things, a step-ladder and bird-boxes, and shelves for the store-room.

‘I was with her one day,’ Plunkett said, not telling the truth now. ‘We were standing in the garage looking at the timber. “You could make a coffin out of that,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever made a coffin, Plunkett.” Those were her exact words. Then she turned and went away: I knew what she meant.’

They believed this lie because to their knowledge he had never lied before. They believed that Mrs Abercrombie had spoken of a coffin, but Miss Bell and Mrs Pope considered that she had only spoken in passing, without significance. Mr Apse and Tindall, wishing to believe that the old woman had been giving a hint to Plunkett, saw no reason to doubt that she had.

‘I really couldn’t,’ Miss Bell said, ‘be a party to anything like that.’

For the first time in their association Plunkett disliked Miss Bell. He’d always thought her a little field-mouse of a thing, all brown creases he imagined her body would be, like her face. Mrs Abercrombie had asked him what he’d thought when Miss Bell had answered the advertisement for an assistant gardener. ‘She’s been a teacher,’ Mrs Abercrombie had said, handing him Miss Bell’s letter, in which it was stated that Miss Bell was qualified to teach geography but had been medically advised to seek outdoor work. ‘No harm in seeing her,’ he’d said, and had promised to give Mrs Abercrombie his own opinion after he’d opened the hall door to the applicant and received her into the hall.

‘You would not be here, Miss Bell,’ he said now, ‘if I hadn’t urged Mrs Abercrombie that it wasn’t peculiar to employ a woman in the garden. She was dead against it.’

‘But that’s no reason to go against the law,’ Mrs Pope cried, shrill again. ‘Just because she took a woman into the garden doesn’t mean anything.’

‘You would not be here yourself, Mrs Pope. She was extremely reluctant to have a woman whose only experience in the cooking line was in a hostel. It was I who had an instinct about your letter, Mrs Pope.’

‘There’s still Dr Ripley,’ Miss Bell said, feeling that all the protestation and argument were anyway in vain because Dr Ripley was shortly due in the house and would put an end to all this absurdity. Dr Ripley would issue a death certificate and would probably himself inform a firm of undertakers. The death of Mrs Abercrombie had temporarily affected Plunkett, Miss Bell considered. She’d once read in the Daily Telegraph of a woman who’d wished to keep the dead body of her husband under glass.

‘Of course there’s Dr Ripley,’ Mrs Pope said. She spoke sharply and with a trace of disdain in her voice. If Mrs Abercrombie had let them down by dying before her time, then Plunkett was letting them down even more. Plunkett had always been in charge, taking decisions about everything, never at a loss. It was ironic that he should be the one to lose his head now.

‘It is Dr Ripley I’m thinking about,’ Plunkett said. ‘People will say he neglected her.’

There was a silence then in the kitchen. Mrs Pope had begun to lick her lips, a habit with her when she was about to speak. She changed her mind and somehow, because of what had been said about Dr Ripley, found herself less angry. Everyone liked the old doctor, even though they’d often agreed in the kitchen that he was beyond it.

When Plunkett said that Dr Ripley might have neglected Mrs Abercrombie, guilt nibbled at Miss Bell. There was a time two years ago when she’d cut her hand on a piece of metal embedded in soil. She’d gone to Dr Ripley with it and although he’d chatted to her and been extremely kind his treatment hadn’t been successful. A week later her whole arm had swelled up and Plunkett had insisted on driving her to the out-patients’ department of a hospital. She was lucky to keep the arm, an Indian doctor had pronounced, adding that someone had been careless.

Mrs Pope recalled the affair of Miss Bell’s hand, and Mr Apse recalled the occasion, and so did Tindall. In the snow once Dr Ripley’s old Vauxhall had skidded on the drive and Mr Apse had had to put gravel under the back wheels to get it out of the ditch. It had puzzled Mr Apse that the skid had occurred because, as far as he could see, there’d been no cause for Dr Ripley to apply his brakes. It had occurred to him afterwards that the doctor hadn’t quite known what he was doing.

‘It’s a terrible thing for a doctor to be disgraced,’ Plunkett said. ‘She thought the world of him, you know.’

The confusion in the kitchen was now considerable. The shock of the death still lingered and with it, though less than before, the feeling of resentment. There was the varying reaction to Plunkett’s proposal that Mrs Abercrombie’s remains should be quietly disposed of. There was concern for Dr Ripley, and a mounting uneasiness that caused the concern to give way to a more complicated emotion: it wasn’t simply that the negligence of Dr Ripley had brought about a patient’s death, it seemed that his negligence must be shared, since they had known he wasn’t up to it and had not spoken out.

‘Her death will cause unhappiness all round,’ Plunkett said. ‘Which she didn’t wish at all. He’d be struck off.’

Dr Ripley had attended Miss Bell on a previous occasion, a few months after her arrival in Rews Manor. She’d come out in spots which Dr Ripley had diagnosed as German measles. He had been called in when Tindall had influenza in 1960. He’d been considerate and efficient about a tiresome complaint of Mrs Pope’s.

The two images of Dr Ripley hovered in the kitchen: a man firm of purpose and skilful in his heyday, moustached and smart but always sympathetic, a saviour who had become a medical menace.

‘She died of gallstones,’ Plunkett said, ‘which for eight or nine years she suffered from, a fact he always denied. She’d be still alive if he’d treated her.’

‘We don’t know it was gallstones,’ Miss Bell protested quietly.

‘We would have to say. We would have to say that she complained of gallstones.’ Plunkett looked severe. ‘If he puts down pneumonia on the death certificate we would have to disagree. After all,’ he continued, his severity increasing with each word, ‘he could kill other people too.’

He looked from one face to another and saw that the mind behind each was lost in the confusion he had created. He, though, could see his way through the murk of it. Out of the necessary chaos he could already see the order he desired, and it seemed to him now that everything else he had ever experienced paled beside the excitement of the idea he’d been visited by.

‘We must bargain with Dr Ripley,’ he said, ‘for his own sake. She would not have wished him to be punished for his negligence, any more than she would wish us to suffer through her unnecessary death. We must put it all to Dr Ripley. He must sign a death certificate in her room this morning and forget to hand it in. I would be satisfied with that.’

‘Forget?’ Miss Bell repeated, aghast and totally astonished.

‘Or leave it behind here and forget that he has left it behind. Any elderly behaviour like that, it’s all of a piece. I’m sure there’s no law that says she can’t be quietly put away in the garden, and the poor old chap’ll be long since dead before anyone thinks to ask a question. We would have saved his bacon for him and be looked after ourselves, just as she wished. No one would bother about any of it in a few years’ time, and we’d have done no wrong by burying her where she wished to be. Only the old chap would be a bit amiss by keeping quiet about a death, but he’d be safely out of business by then.’

Mr Apse remembered a lifetime’s association with the garden of Rews Manor, and Mrs Pope recalled the cheerless kitchens of the YWCA, and Miss Bell saw herself kneeling in a flower-bed on an autumn evening, taking begonia tubers from the earth. There could be no other garden for Mr Apse, and for Miss Bell no other garden either, and no other kitchen for Mrs Pope. Plunkett might propose to her, Tindall said to herself, just in order to go on sharing beds with her, but the marriage would not be happy because it was not what they wanted.

‘There’s the will,’ Miss Bell said, whispering so low that her words were almost incomprehensible. ‘There’s the will she has signed.’

‘In time,’ Plunkett said, ‘the will shall naturally come into its own. That is what she intended. We should all be properly looked after, and then the grass merchants will take over, as laid down. When the place is no longer of use to us.’ He added that he felt he had been visited, that the idea had quite definitely come from outside himself rather than from within. Regretful in death, he said, Mrs Abercrombie had expressed herself to him because she was cross with herself, because she was worried for her servants and for the old doctor.

‘He let her die of neglected gallstones,’ Plunkett repeated with firm conviction. ‘A most obvious complaint.’

In the hall the doorbell rang, a clanging sound, for the bell was of an old-fashioned kind.

‘Well?’ Plunkett said, looking from one face to another.

‘We don’t know that it was gallstones,’ Miss Bell protested again. ‘She only mentioned gallstones. Dr Ripley said –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Bell!’

He glared at Miss Bell with dislike in his face. They’d been through all that, he said: gallstones or something else, what did it matter? The woman was dead.

‘It’s perfectly clear to all of us, Miss Bell, that Mrs Abercrombie would not have wished her death to cause all this fuss. That’s the only point I’m making. In my opinion, apparently not shared by you, Mrs Abercrombie was a woman of remarkable sensitivity. And kindness, Miss Bell. Do you really believe that she would have wished to inflict this misery on a harmless old doctor?’ He paused, staring at Miss Bell, aware that the dislike in his face was upsetting her. ‘Do you really believe she wished to deprive us of our home? Do you believe that Mrs Abercrombie was unkind?’

Miss Bell did not say anything, and in the silence the doorbell pealed again. Mrs Pope was aware that her head had begun to ache. Mr Apse took his pipe from his pocket and put it on the table. He cut slivers from a plug of tobacco and rubbed them together in the palm of his left hand. Tindall watched him, thinking that she had never seen him preparing his pipe in the kitchen before.

‘You’re mad!’ Miss Bell suddenly cried. ‘The whole thing has affected you, Plunkett. It’s ridiculous what you’re saying.’ The blood had gone to her face and neck, and showed in dark blotches beneath her weathered skin. Her eyes, usually so tranquil, shone fierily in her anger. She didn’t move, but continued to stand at the corner of the kitchen table, just behind Mr Apse, who was looking up at her, astonished.

‘How can we possibly do such a thing?’ Miss Bell shrieked. ‘It’s a disgusting, filthy kind of thing to suggest. Her body’s still warm and you can stand, there saying that everything should be falsified. You don’t care tuppence for Dr Ripley, it’s not Dr Ripley who matters to you. They could hang him for murder –’

‘I did not say Dr Ripley would be hanged.’

‘You implied it. You implied the most terrible things.’

The power left her voice as she uttered the last three words. Her eyes closed for a moment and when she opened them again she was weeping.

‘Now, now, my dear,’ Mrs Pope said, going to her and putting a hand on her arm.

‘I am only thinking of Mrs Abercrombie’s wishes,’ Plunkett said, unmoved and still severe. ‘Her wishes didn’t say the old doctor should be hounded.’

Mrs Pope continued to murmur consolation. She sat Miss Bell down at the table. Tindall went to a drawer in the dresser and took from it a number of household tissues which she placed in front of Miss Bell. Mr Apse pressed the shredded tobacco into his pipe.

‘I see no reason at all not to have a private household funeral,’ Plunkett said. He spoke slowly, emphasizing the repetition in his statement, summing everything up. What right had the stupid little creature to create a ridiculous fuss when the other three would easily now have left everything in his hands? It wasn’t she who mattered, or she who had the casting vote: it was old Ripley, still standing on the doorstep.

‘No,’ Miss Bell whispered. ‘No, no.’

It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare to be crouched over the kitchen table, with Mrs Pope’s hand on her shoulder and tissues laid out in front of her. It was a nightmare to think that Mr Apse wouldn’t have cared what they did with Mrs Abercrombie, that Tindall wouldn’t have cared, that Mrs Pope was coming round to Plunkett’s horrible suggestions. It was a nightmare to think of the doctor being blackmailed by Plunkett’s oily tongue. Plunkett was like an animal, some creature out of which a devil of hell had come.

‘Best maybe to have a chat with the doctor,’ Miss Bell heard Mrs Pope’s voice say, and heard the agreement of Tindall, soothing, like a murmur. She was aware of Mr Apse nodding his head. Plunkett said:

‘I think that’s fair.’

‘No. No, no,’ Miss Bell cried.

‘Then what is fair, Miss Bell?’ Mrs Pope, quite sharply, asked.

‘Mrs Abercrombie is dead. It must be reported.’

‘That’s the doctor’s job,’ Plunkett pointed out. ‘It don’t concern us.’

‘The doctor’ll know,’ Tindall said, considering it odd that Plunkett had all of a sudden used bad grammar, a lapse she had never before heard from him.

Without saying anything else, Plunkett left the kitchen.

Dr Ripley, who had pulled the bell four times, was pulling it again when Plunkett opened the hall door. The butler, Dr Ripley thought, was looking dishevelled and somewhat flushed. Blood pressure, he automatically said to himself, while commenting on the weather.

‘She died,’ Plunkett said. ‘I wanted to tell you in person, Doctor.’

They stood for a moment while Plunkett explained the circumstances, giving the time of death as nine thirty or thereabouts.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘Poor dear.’

He mounted the stairs, with Plunkett behind him. Never again would he do so, he said to himself, since he, too, knew that the house was to pass into the possession of an organization which studied grasses. In the bedroom he examined the body and noted that death was due to simple heart failure, a brief little attack, he reckoned, judging by her countenance and the unflustered arrangement of her body. He sighed over the corpse, although he was used to corpses. It seemed a lifetime, and indeed it was, since he had attended her for a throat infection when she was a bride.

‘Heart,’ Dr Ripley said on the landing outside the bedroom. ‘She was very beautiful, you know. In her day, Plunkett.’

Plunkett nodded. He stood aside to allow the doctor to precede him downstairs.

‘She’ll be happy,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘Being still in love with her husband.’

Again Plunkett nodded, even though the doctor couldn’t see him. ‘We wondered what best to do,’ he said.

‘Do?’

‘You’ll be issuing a certificate?’

‘Well yes, of course.’

‘It was that we were wondering about. The others and myself.’

‘Wondering?’

‘I’d like a chat with you, Doctor.’

Dr Ripley, who hadn’t turned his head while having this conversation, reached the hall. Plunkett stepped round him and led the way to the drawing-room.

‘A glass of sherry?’ Plunkett suggested.

‘Well, that’s most kind of you, Plunkett. In the circumstances –’

‘I think she’d have wished you to have one, sir.’

‘Yes, maybe she would.’

Plunkett poured from a decanter and handed Dr Ripley the glass. He waited for the doctor to sip before he spoke.

‘She sent a message to you, Doctor. Late last night she rang her bell and asked for me. She said she had a feeling she might die in the night. “If I do,” she said, “I don’t want him blamed.” ’

‘Blamed? Who blamed? I don’t understand you, Plunkett.’

‘I asked her that myself. “Who blamed?” I said, and she said: “Dr Ripley.” ’

Plunkett watched while a mouthful of sherry was consumed. He moved to the decanter and carried it to Dr Ripley’s glass. Mrs Abercrombie had had a heart attack, Dr Ripley said. He couldn’t have saved her even if he’d been called in time.

‘Naturally, we didn’t send for you last night, sir, even though she said that. On account of your attitude, Doctor.’

‘Attitude?’

‘You considered her a hypochondriac, sir.’

‘Mrs Abercrombie was.’

‘No, sir. She was a sick woman.’

Dr Ripley finished his second glass of sherry and crossed the drawing-room to the decanter. He poured some more, filling the glass to the brim.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Plunkett.’

It the kitchen they did not speak. Mrs Pope made more coffee and put pieces of shortbread on a plate. No one ate the shortbread, and Miss Bell shook her head when Mrs Pope began to refill her coffee-cup.

‘Bovril, dear?’ Mrs Pope suggested, but Miss Bell rejected Bovril also.

The garden had an atmosphere, different scents came out at different times of year, varying also from season to season. It was in the garden that she’d realized how unhappy she’d been, for eleven years, teaching geography. Yet even if the garden were Paradise itself you couldn’t just bury a dead woman in it and pretend she hadn’t died. Every day of your life you’d pass the mound, your whole existence would be a lie.

‘I’ll go away,’ Miss Bell said shakily, in a whisper. ‘I’ll pack and go. I promise you, I’ll never tell a thing.’

To Dr Ripley’s astonishment, Mrs Abercrombie’s butler accused him of negligence and added that it would have been Mrs Abercrombie’s desire to hush the matter up. He said that Mrs Abercrombie would never have wished to disgrace an old man.

‘What I’m suggesting,’ Plunkett said, ‘is that you give the cause of death to suit yourself and then become forgetful.’

‘Forgetful?’

‘Leave the certificate behind you, sir, as if in error.’

‘But it has to be handed in, Plunkett. Look here, there’s no disgrace involved, or negligence or anything else. You haven’t been drinking, have you?’

‘It’s a decision we came to in the kitchen, Doctor. We’re all agreed.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, man –’

‘Mrs Abercrombie’s wish was that her body should be buried in the shrubbery, beside her husband’s. That can be quietly done. Your good name would continue, Doctor, without a stain. Whether or not you take on further patients is your own affair.’

Dr Ripley sat down. He stared through wire-rimmed spectacles at a man he had always considered pleasant. Yet this same man was now clearly implying that he was more of an undertaker than a doctor.

‘What I am saying, sir, is that Rews Manor shall continue as Mrs Abercrombie wished it to. What I am saying is that you and we shall enter into the small conspiracy that Mrs Abercrombie is guiding us towards.’

‘Guiding?’

‘Since her death she has been making herself felt all over the house. Read that, sir.’

He handed Dr Ripley the letter from Mrs Abercrombie’s solicitors, which Dr Ripley slowly read and handed back. Plunkett said:

‘It would be disgraceful to go against the wishes of the recently dead, especially those of a person like Mrs Abercrombie, who was kindness itself – to all of us, and to you, sir.’

‘You’re suggesting that her death should be suppressed, Plunkett? So that you and the others may remain here?’

‘So that you may not face charges, sir.’

‘But, for the Lord’s sake, man, I’d face no charges. I’ve done nothing at all.’

‘A doctor can be in trouble for doing nothing, when he should be doing everything, when he should be prolonging life instead of saying his patients are imagining things.’

‘But Mrs Abercrombie did –’

‘In the kitchen we’re all agreed, sir. We remember, Doctor. We remember Miss Bell’s hand a few years ago, that she nearly died of. Criminal neglect, they said in the out-patients’. Another thing, we remember the time we had to get your car out of the ditch.’

‘I skidded. There was ice –’

‘I have seen you drunk, Doctor,’ Plunkett said, ‘at half past ten in the morning.’

Dr Ripley stared harder at Plunkett, believing him now to be insane. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then, recovering from his bewilderment, he spoke quietly and slowly. There was a perfectly good explanation for the skid on the icy snow of the drive: he’d braked to avoid a blackbird that was limping about in front of him. He’d never in his life been drunk at half past ten in the morning.

‘You know as well as I do,’ Plunkett continued, as though he were deaf or as though the doctor hadn’t spoken, ‘you know as well as I do that Mrs Abercrombie wouldn’t rest if she was responsible for getting you into the Sunday papers.’

In the kitchen they did not reply when Miss Bell said she’d pack and go. They didn’t look at her, and she knew they were thinking that she wouldn’t be able to keep her word. They were thinking she was hysterical and frightened, and that the weight of so eccentric a secret would prove too much for her.

‘It’s just that Mrs Abercrombie wanted to change her will, dear,’ Mrs Pope said.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Apse.

They spoke gently, in soft tones like Miss Bell’s own. They looked at her in a gentle way, and Tindall smiled at her, gently also. They’d be going against Mrs Abercrombie as soon as she was dead, Tindall said, speaking as softly as the others had spoken. They must abide by what had been in Mrs Abercrombie’s heart, Mr Apse said.

Again Miss Bell wondered what she would do when she left the garden, and wondered then if she had the right to plunge these people into unhappiness. With their faces so gently disposed before her, and with Plunkett out of the room, she saw for the first time their point of view. She said to herself that Plunkett would return to normal, since all her other knowledge of him seemed to prove that he was not a wicked man. Certainly there was no wickedness in Mrs Pope or Mr Apse, or in Tindall; and was it really so terrible, she found herself wondering then, to take from Mrs Abercombie what she had wished to give? Did it make sense to quibble now when you had never quibbled over Dr Ripley’s diagnosis of hypochondria?

Miss Bell imagined the mound in the shrubbery beside the other mound, and meals in the kitchen, the same as ever, and visitors in the garden on a Sunday, and the admission charges still passed on to the Nurses. She imagined, as often she had, growing quite old in the setting she had come to love.

‘A quiet little funeral,’ Mrs Pope said. ‘She’d have wanted that.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Apse said.

In her quiet voice, not looking at anyone, Miss Bell apologized for making a fuss.

To Dr Ripley’s surprise, Plunkett took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. He blew out smoke. He said:

‘Neglected gallstones: don’t wriggle out of it, Doctor.’ His voice was cool and ungracious. He regarded Dr Ripley contemptuously. ‘What about Bell’s hand? That woman near died as well.’

For a moment Dr Ripley felt incapable of a reply. He remembered the scratch on Miss Bell’s hand, a perfectly clean little wound. He’d put some iodine on it and a sticking-plaster dressing. He’d told her on no account to go poking it into her flower-beds, but of course she’d taken no notice.

‘Miss Bell was extremely foolish,’ he said at length, speaking quietly. ‘She should have returned to me the moment the complication began.’

‘You weren’t to be found, Doctor. You were in the bar of the Clarence Hotel or down in the Royal Oak, or the Rogues’ Arms –’

‘I am not a drunkard, Plunkett. I was not negligent in the matter of Miss Bell’s hand. Nor was I negligent over Mrs Abercrombie. Mrs Abercrombie suffered in no way whatsoever from gallstone trouble. Her heart was a little tired; she had a will to die and she died.’

‘That isn’t true, Doctor. She had a will to live, as this letter proves. She had a will to get matters sorted out –’

‘If I were you, Plunkett, I’d go and lie down for a while.’

Dr Ripley spoke firmly. The astonishment that the butler had caused in him had vanished, leaving him unflustered and professional. His eyes behind their spectacles stared steadily into Plunkett’s. He didn’t seem at all beyond the work he did.

‘Your car skidded,’ Plunkett said, though without his previous confidence. ‘You were whistled to the gills on Christmas booze that day –’

‘That’s offensive and untrue, Plunkett.’

‘All I’m saying, sir, is that it’d be better for all concerned –’

‘I’d be obliged if you didn’t speak to me in that manner, Plunkett.’

To Plunkett’s horror, Dr Ripley began to go. He placed his empty sherry glass on the table beside the decanter. He buttoned his jacket.

‘Please, sir,’ Plunkett said, changing his tone a little and hastening towards the sherry decanter. ‘Have another glassful, sir.’

Dr Ripley ignored the invitation. ‘I would just like to speak to the others,’ he said, ‘before I go.’

‘Of course. Of course, sir.’

It was, Dr Ripley recognized afterwards, curiosity that caused him to make that request. Were the others in the same state as Plunkett? Had they, too, changed in a matter of hours from being agreeable people to being creatures you could neither like nor respect nor even take seriously? Would they, too, accuse him to his face of negligence and drunkenness?

In the kitchen the others rose to their feet when he entered.

‘Doctor’s here to have a word,’ Plunkett said. He added that Dr Ripley had come to see their point of view, a statement that Dr Ripley didn’t contradict immediately. He said instead that he was sorry that Mrs Abercrombie had died.

‘Oh, so are we, sir,’ Mrs Pope cried. ‘We’re sorry and shaken, sir.’

But in the kitchen Dr Ripley didn’t feel their sorrow, any more than he had felt sorrow emanating from Plunkett in the drawing-room. In the kitchen there appeared to be fear in the eyes of quiet Mr Apse and in the eyes of Mrs Pope and the softly-spoken Miss Bell, and in the eyes of Tindall. It was fear, Dr Ripley suddenly realized, that had distorted Plunkett and continued to distort him, though differently now. Fear had bred greed in them, fear had made them desperate, and had turned them into fools.

‘Dr Ripley’ll see us through,’ Plunkett said.

When he told the truth, they didn’t say anything at all. Not even Plunkett spoke, and for a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the soft weeping of Miss Bell.

‘Her wishes were clear,’ Dr Ripley said. ‘She died when she knew she’d made them so, when she received the letter this morning. Her wishes would have been honoured in law, even though they weren’t in a will.’

They stood like statues in the kitchen. The weeping of Miss Bell ceased; there was no sound at all. They would none of them remain in the house now, Dr Ripley thought, because of their exposure one to another. In guilt and deception they had imagined they would remain, held together by their aberration. But now, with the memory of their greed and the irony of their error, there would be hatred and shame among them.

He wanted to comfort them, but could not. He wanted to say that they should forget what had taken place since Mrs Abercrombie’s death, that they should attempt to carry out her wishes. But he knew it was too late for any of that. He turned and went away, leaving them still standing like statues. It was strange, he thought as he made his way through the house, that a happiness which had been so rich should have trailed such a snare behind it. And yet it seemed cruelly fitting that the loss of so much should wreak such damage in pleasant, harmless people.

Mrs Acland’s Ghosts

Mr Mockler was a tailor. He carried on his business in a house that after twenty-five years of mortgage arrangements had finally become his: 22 Juniper Street, SW17. He had never married and since he was now sixty-three it seemed likely that he never would. In an old public house, the Charles the First, he had a drink every evening with his friends Mr Uprichard and Mr Tile, who were tailors also. He lived in his house in Juniper Street with his cat Sam, and did his own cooking and washing and cleaning: he was not unhappy.

On the morning of 19 October 1972, Mr Mockler received a letter that astonished him. It was neatly written in a pleasantly rounded script that wasn’t difficult to decipher. It did not address, him as ‘Dear Mr Mockler’, nor was it signed, nor conventionally concluded. But his name was used repeatedly, and from its contents it seemed to Mr Mockler that the author of the letter was a Mrs Acland. He read the letter in amazement and then read it again and then, more slowly, a third time:

Dr Scott-Rowe is dead, Mr Mockler. I know he is dead because a new man is here, a smaller, younger man, called Dr Friendman. He looks at us, smiling, with his unblinking eyes. Miss Acheson says you can tell at a glance that he has practised hypnosis.

They’re so sure of themselves, Mr Mockler: beyond the limits of their white-coated world they can accept nothing. 1 am a woman imprisoned because I once saw ghosts. I am paid for by the man who was my husband, who writes out monthly cheques for the peaches they bring to my room, and the beef olives and the marrons glacés. ‘She must above all things be happy,’ I can imagine the stout man who was my husband saying, walking with Dr Scott-Rowe over the sunny lawns and among the rose-beds. In this house there are twenty disturbed people in private rooms, cosseted by luxury because other people feel guilty. And when we walk ourselves on the lawns and among the rose-beds we murmur at the folly of those who have so expensively committed us, and at the greater folly of the medical profession: you can be disturbed without being mad. Is this the letter of a lunatic, Mr Mockler?

I said this afternoon to Miss Acheson that Dr Scott-Rowe was dead. She said she knew. All of us would have Dr Friendman now, she said, with his smile and his tape-recorders. ‘May Dr Scott-Rowe rest in peace,’ said Miss Acheson: it was better to be dead than to be like Dr Friendman. Miss Acheson is a very old lady, twice my age exactly: I am thirty-nine and she is seventy-eight. She was committed when she was eighteen, in 1913, a year before the First World War. Miss Acheson was disturbed by visions of St Olaf of Norway and she still is. Such visions were an embarrassment to Miss Acheson’s family in 1913 and so they quietly slipped her away. No one comes to see her now, no one has since 1927.

‘You must write it all down,’ Miss Acheson said to me when I told her, years ago, that I’d been committed because I’d seen ghosts and that I could prove the ghosts were real because the Rachels had seen them too. The Rachels are living some normal existence somewhere, yet they were terrified half out of their wits at the time and I wasn’t frightened at all. The trouble nowadays, Miss Acheson says and I quite agree, is that if you like having ghosts near you people think you’re round the bend.

I was talking to Miss Acheson about all this yesterday and she said why didn’t I do what Sarah Crookham used to do? There’s nothing the matter with Sarah Crookham, any more than there is with Miss Acheson or myself: all that Sarah Crookham suffers from is a broken heart. ‘You must write it all down,’ Miss Acheson said to her when she first came here, weeping, poor thing, every minute of the day. So she wrote it, down and posted it to A. J. Rawson, a person she found in the telephone directory. But Mr Rawson never came, nor another person Sarah Crookham wrote to. I have looked you up in the telephone directory, Mr Mockler. It is nice to have a visitor.

‘You must begin at the beginning,’ Miss. Acheson says, and so I am doing that. The beginning is back a bit, in January 1949, when I was fifteen. We lived in Richmond then, my parents and one brother, George, and my sisters Alice and Isabel. On Sundays, after lunch, we used to walk all together in Richmond Park with our dog, a Dalmatian called Salmon. I was the oldest and Alice was next, two years younger, and George was eleven and Isabel eight. It was lovely walking together in Richmond Park and then going home to Sunday tea. I remember the autumns and winters best, the cosiness of the coal fire, hot sponge cake and special Sunday sandwiches, and little buns that Alice and I always helped to make on Sunday mornings. We played Monopoly by the fire, and George would always have the ship and Anna the hat and Isabel the racing-car and Mummy the dog. Daddy and I would share the old boot. I really loved it.

I loved the house: 17 Lorelei Avenue, an ordinary suburban house built some time in the early 1920s, when Miss Acheson was still quite young. There were bits of stained glass on either side of the hall door and a single stained-glass pane, Moses in the bulrushes, in one of the landing windows. At Christmas especially it was lovely: we’d have the Christmas tree in the hall and always on Christmas Eve, as long as I can remember, there’d be a party, I can remember the parties quite vividly. There’d be people standing round drinking punch and the children would play hide-and-seek upstairs, and nobody could ever find George. It’s George, Mr Mockler, that all this is about. And Alice, of course, and Isabel.

When I first described them to Dr Scott-Rowe he said they sounded marvellous, and I said I thought they probably were, but I suppose a person can be prejudiced in family matters of that kind. Because they were, after all, my brother and my two sisters and because, of course, they’re dead now. I mean, they were probably ordinary, just like any children. Well, you can see what you think, Mr Mockler.

George was small for his age, very wiry, dark-haired, a darting kind of boy who was always laughing, who had often to be reprimanded by my father because his teachers said he was the most mischievous boy in his class. Alice, being two years older, was just the opposite: demure and silent, but happy in her quiet way, and beautiful, far more beautiful than I was. Isabel wasn’t beautiful at all. She was all freckles, with long pale plaits and long legs that sometimes could run as fast as George’s. She and George were as close as two persons can get, but in a way we were all close: there was a lot of love in 17 Lorelei Avenue.

I had a cold the day it happened, a Saturday it was. I was cross because they kept worrying about leaving me in the house on my own. They’d bring me back Black Magic chocolates, they said, and my mother said she’d buy a bunch of daffodils if she saw any. I heard the car crunching over the gravel outside the garage, and then their voices telling Salmon not to put his paws on the upholstery. My father blew the horn, saying goodbye to me, and after that the silence began. I must have known even then, long before it happened, that nothing would be the same again.

When I was twenty-two, Mr Mockler, I married a man called Acland, who helped me to get over the tragedy. George would have been eighteen, and Anna twenty and Isabel fifteen. They would have liked my husband because he was a good-humoured and generous man. He was very plump, many years older than I was, with a fondness for all food. ‘You’re like a child,’ I used to say to him and we’d laugh together. Cheese in particular he liked, and ham and every kind of root vegetable, parsnips, turnips, celeriac, carrots, leeks, potatoes. He used to come back to the house and take four or five pounds of gammon from the car, and chops, and blocks of ice-cream, and biscuits, and two or even three McVitie’s fruitcakes. He was very partial to McVitie’s fruitcakes. At night, at nine or ten o’clock, he’d make cocoa for both of us and we’d have it while we were watching the television, with a slice or two of fruitcake. He was such a kind man in those days. I got quite fat myself, which might surprise you, Mr Mockler, because I’m on the thin side now.

My husband was, and still is, both clever and rich. One led to the other: he made a fortune designing metal fasteners for the aeroplane industry. Once, in May 1960, he drove me to a house in Worcestershire. ‘I wanted it to be a surprise,’ he said, stopping his mustard-coloured Alfa-Romeo in front of this quite extensive Victorian façade. ‘There,’ he said, embracing me, reminding me that it was my birthday. Two months later we went to live there.

We had no children. In the large Victorian house I made my life with the man I’d married and once again, as in 17 Lorelei Avenue, I was happy. The house was near a village but otherwise remote. My husband went away from it by day, to the place where his aeroplane fasteners were manufactured and tested. There were – and still are – aeroplanes in the air which would have fallen to pieces if they hadn’t been securely fastened by the genius of my husband.

The house had many rooms. There was a large square drawing-room with a metal ceiling – beaten tin, I believe it was. It had patterns like wedding-cake icing on it. It was painted white and blue, and gave, as well as the impression of a wedding-cake, a Wedgwood effect. People remarked on this ceiling and my husband used to explain that metal ceilings had once been very popular, especially in the large houses of Australia. Well-to-do Australians, apparently, would have them shipped from Birmingham in colonial imitation of an English fashion. My husband and I, arm in arm, would lead people about the house, pointing out the ceiling or the green wallpaper in our bedroom or the portraits hung on the stairs.

The lighting was bad in the house. The long first-floor landing was a gloomy place by day and lit by a single wall-light at night. At the end of this landing another flight of stairs, less grand than the stairs that led from the hall, wound upwards to the small rooms that had once upon a time been servants’ quarters, and another flight continued above them to attics and store-rooms. The bathroom was on the first floor, tiled in green Victorian tiles, and there was a lavatory next door to it, encased in mahogany.

In the small rooms that had once been the servants’ quarters lived Mr and Mrs Rachels. My husband had had a kitchen and a bathroom put in for them so that their rooms were quite self-contained. Mr Rachels worked in the garden and his wife cleaned the house. It wasn’t really necessary to have them at all: I could have cleaned the house myself and even done the gardening, but my husband insisted in his generous way. At night I could hear the Rachels moving about above me I didn’t like this and my husband asked them to move more quietly.

In 1962 my husband was asked to go to Germany, to explain his aeroplane fasteners to the German aircraft industry. It was to be a prolonged trip, three months at least, and I was naturally unhappy when he told me. He was unhappy himself, but on March 4th he flew to Hamburg, leaving me with the Rachels.

They were a pleasant enough couple, somewhere in their fifties I would think, he rather silent, she inclined to talk. The only thing that worried me about them was the way they used to move about at night above my head. After my husband had gone to Germany I gave Mrs Rachels money to buy slippers, but I don’t think she ever did because the sounds continued just as before. I naturally didn’t make a fuss about it.

On the night of March 7th I was awakened by a band playing in the house. The tune was an old tune of the fifties called, I believe, ‘Looking for Henry Lee’. The noise was very loud in my bedroom and I lay there frightened, not knowing why this noise should be coming to me like this, Victor Silvester in strict dance tempo. Then a voice spoke, a long babble of French, and I realized that 1 was listening to a radio programme. The wireless was across the room, on a table by the windows. I put on my bedside light and got up and switched it off. I drank some orange juice and went back to sleep. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder who had turned it on.

The next day I told Mrs Rachels about it, and it was she, in fact, who made me think that it was all rather stranger than it seemed. I definitely remembered turning the wireless off myself before going to bed, and in any case I was not in the habit of listening to French stations, so that even if the wireless had somehow come on of its own accord it should not have been tuned in to a French station.

Two days later I found the bath half-filled with water and the towels all rumpled and damp, thrown about on the floor. The water in the bath was tepid and dirty: someone, an hour or so ago, had had a bath.

I climbed the stairs to the Rachels’ flat and knocked on their door. ‘Is your bathroom out of order?’ I said when Mr Rachels came to the door, not wearing the slippers I’d given them money for. I said I didn’t at all mind their using mine, only I’d be grateful if they’d remember to let the water out and to bring down their own towels. Mr Rachels looked at me in the way people have sometimes, as though you’re insane. He called his wife and all three of us went down to look at my bathroom. They denied emphatically that either of them had had a bath.

When I came downstairs the next morning, having slept badly, I found the kitchen table had been laid for four. There was a tablecloth on the table, which was something I never bothered about, and a kettle was boiling on the Aga. Beside it, a large brown teapot, not the one I normally used, was heating. I made some tea and sat down, thinking about the Rachels. Why should they behave like this? Why should they creep into my bedroom in the middle of the night and turn the wireless on? Why should they have a bath in my bathroom and deny it? Why should they lay the breakfast table as though we had overnight guests? I left the table just as it was. Butter had been rolled into pats. Marmalade had been placed in two china dishes. A silver toast-rack that an aunt of my husband had given us as a wedding present was waiting for toast.

‘Thank you for laying the table,’ said to Mrs Rachels when she entered the kitchen an hour later.

She shook her head. She began to say that she hadn’t laid the table but then she changed her mind. I could see from her face that she and her husband had been discussing the matter of the bath the night before. She could hardly wait to tell him about the breakfast table. I smiled at her.

‘A funny thing happened the other night,’ I said. ‘I woke up to find Victor Silvester playing a tune called “Looking for Henry Lee”.’

‘Henry Lee?’ Mrs Rachels said, turning around from the sink. Her face, usually blotched with pink, like the skin of an apple, was white.

‘It’s an old song of the fifties.’

It was while saying that that I realized what was happening in the house. I naturally didn’t say anything to Mrs Rachels, and I at once began to regret that I’d said anything in the first place. It had frightened me, finding the bathroom like that, and clearly it must have frightened the Rachels. I didn’t want them to be frightened because naturally there was nothing to be frightened about. George and Alice and Isabel wouldn’t hurt anyone, not unless death had changed them enormously. But even so. I knew I couldn’t ever explain that to the Rachels.

‘Well, I suppose I’m just getting absent-minded,’ I said. ‘People do, so they say, when they live alone.’ I laughed to show I wasn’t worried or frightened, to make it all seem ordinary.

‘You mean, you laid the table yourself?’ Mrs Rachels said. ‘And had a bath?’

‘And didn’t turn the wireless off properly. Funny,’ I said, ‘how these things go in threes. Funny, how there’s always an explanation.’ I laughed again and Mrs Rachels had to laugh too.

After that it was lovely, just like being back in 17 Lorelei Avenue. I bought Black Magic chocolates and bars of Fry’s and Cadbury’s Milk, all the things we’d liked. I often found bathwater left in and the towels crumpled, and now and again I came down in the morning to find the breakfast table laid. On the first-floor landing, on the evening of March 11th, I caught a glimpse of George, and in the garden, three days later, I saw Isabel and Alice.

On March 15th the Rachels left. I hadn’t said a word to them about finding the bathroom used again or the breakfast laid or actually seeing the children. I’d been cheerful and smiling whenever I met them. I’d talked about how Brasso wasn’t as good as it used to be to Mrs Rachels, and had asked her husband about the best kinds of soil for bulbs.

‘We can’t stay a minute more,’ Mrs Rachels said, her face all white and tight in the hall, and then to my astonishment they attempted to persuade me to go also.

‘The house isn’t fit to live in,’ Mr Rachels said.

‘Oh now, that’s nonsense,’ I began to say, but they both shook their heads.

‘There’s children here,’ Mrs Rachels said. ‘There’s three children appearing all over the place.’

‘Come right up to you,’ Mr Rachels said. ‘Laugh at you sometimes.’

They were trembling, both of them. They were so terrified I thought they might die, that their hearts would give out there in the hall and they’d just drop down. But they didn’t. They walked out of the hall door with their three suitcases, down the drive to catch a bus. I never saw them again.

I suppose, Mr Mockler, you have to be frightened of ghosts: I suppose that’s their way of communicating. I mean, it’s no good being like me, delighting in it all, being happy because I wasn’t lonely in that house any more. You have to be like the Rachels, terrified half out of your wits. I think I knew that as I watched the Rachels go: I think I knew that George and Isabel and Alice would go with them, that I was only a kind of go-between, that the Rachels were what George and Isabel and Alice could really have fun with. I almost ran after the Rachels, but 1 knew it would be no good.

Without the Rachels and my brother and my two sisters, I was frightened myself in that big house. I moved everything into the kitchen: the television set and the plants I kept in the drawing-room, and a camp-bed to sleep on. I was there, asleep in the camp-bed, when my husband returned from Germany; he had changed completely. He raved at me, not listening to a word I said. There were cups of tea all over the house, he said, and bits of bread and biscuits and cake and chocolates. There were notes in envelopes, and messages scrawled in my hand-writing on the wallpaper in various rooms. Everywhere was dusty. Where, he wanted to know, were the Rachels?

He stood there with a canvas bag in his left hand, an airline bag that had the word Lufthansa on it. He’d put on at least a stone, I remember thinking, and his hair was shorter than before.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I would like to tell you.’ And I tried to tell him, as I’ve told you, Mr Mockler, about George and Isabel and Alice in 17 Lorelei Avenue and how we all went together for a walk with our dog, every Sunday afternoon in Richmond Park, and how on Christmas Eve my mother always gave a party. I told him about the stained-glass pane in the window, Moses in the bulrushes, and the hide-and-seek we played, and how my father and I always shared the old boot in Monopoly. I told him about the day of the accident, how the tyre on the lorry suddenly exploded and how the lorry went whizzing around on the road and then just tumbled over on top of them. I’d put out cups of tea, I said, and biscuits and cake and the little messages, just in case they came back again – not for them to eat or to read particularly, but just as a sign. They’d given me a sign first, I explained: George had turned on my wireless in the middle of the night and Isabel had had baths and Alice had laid the breakfast table. But then they’d gone because they’d been more interested in annoying the Rachels than in comforting me. I began to weep, telling him how lonely I’d been without them, how lonely I’d been ever since the day of the accident, how the silence had been everywhere. I couldn’t control myself: tears came out of my eyes as though they’d never stop. I felt sickness all over my body, paining me in my head and my chest, sour in my stomach. I wanted to die because the loneliness was too much. Loneliness was the worst thing in the world, I said, gasping out words, with spit and tears going cold on my face. People were only shadows, I tried to explain, when you had loneliness and silence like that, like a shroud around you. You couldn’t reach out of the shroud sometimes, you couldn’t connect because shadows are hard to connect with and it’s frightening when you try because everyone is looking at you. But it was lovely, I whispered, when the children came back to annoy the Rachels. My husband replied by telling me I was insane.

The letter finished there, and Mr Mockler was more astonished each time he read it. He had never in his life received such a document before, nor did he in fact very often receive letters of any kind, apart from bills and, if he was fortunate, cheques in settlement. He shook his head over the letter and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

That day, as he stitched and measured, he imagined the place Mrs Acland wrote of, the secluded house with twenty female inmates, and the lawn and the rose-beds. He imagined the other house, 17 Lorelei Avenue in Richmond, and the third house, the Victorian residence in the Worcestershire countryside. He imagined Mrs Acland’s obese husband with his short hair and his aeroplane fasteners, and the children who had been killed in a motor-car accident, and Mr and Mrs Rachels whom they had haunted. All day long the faces of these people flitted through Mr Mockler’s mind, with old Miss Acheson and Sarah Crookham and Dr Scott-Rowe and Dr Friendman. In the evening, when he met his friends Mr Tile and Mr Uprichard in the Charles the First, he showed them the letter before even ordering them drinks.

‘Well, I’m beggared,’ remarked Mr Uprichard, a man known locally for his gentle nature. ‘That poor creature.’

Mr Tile, who was not given to expressing himself, shook his head.

Mr Mockler asked Mr Uprichard if he should visit this Mrs Acland. ‘Poor creature,’ Mr Uprichard said again, and added that without a doubt Mrs Acland had written to a stranger because of the loneliness she mentioned, the loneliness like a shroud around her.

Some weeks later Mr Mockler, having given the matter further thought and continuing to be affected by the contents of the letter, took a Green Line bus out of London to the address that Mrs Acland had given him. He made inquiries, feeling quite adventurous, and was told that the house was three-quarters of a mile from where the bus had dropped him, down a side road. He found it without further difficulty. It was a house surrounded by a high brick wall in which large, black wrought-iron gates were backed with sheets of tin so that no one could look through the ornamental scrollwork. The gates were locked. Mr Mockler rang a bell in the wall.

‘Yes?’ a man said, opening the gate that was on Mr Mockler’s left.

‘Well,’ said Mr Mockler and found it difficult to proceed.

‘Yes?’ the man said.

‘Well, I’ve had a letter. Asking me to come, I think. My name’s Mockler.’

The man opened the gate a little more and Mr Mockler stepped through.

The man walked ahead of him and Mr Mockler saw the lawns that had been described, and the rose-beds. The house he considered most attractive: a high Georgian building with beautiful windows. An old woman was walking slowly by herself with the assistance of a stick: Miss Acheson, Mr Mockler guessed. In the distance he saw other women, walking slowly on leaf-strewn paths.

Autumn was Mr Mockler’s favourite season and he was glad to be in the country on this pleasantly autumnal day. He thought of remarking on this to the man who led him towards the house, but since the man did not incline towards conversation he did not do so.

In the yellow waiting-room there were no magazines and no pictures on the walls and no flowers. It was not a room in which Mr Mockler would have cared to wait for long, and in fact he did not have to. A woman dressed as a nurse except that she wore a green cardigan came in. She smiled briskly at him and said that Dr Friendman would see him. She asked Mr Mockler to follow her.

‘How very good of you to come,’ Dr Friendman said, smiling at Mr Mockler in the way that Mrs Acland, had described in her letter. ‘How very humane,’ said Dr Friendman.

‘I had a letter, from a Mrs Acland.’

‘Quite so, Mr Mockler. Mr Mockler, could I press you towards a glass of sherry?’

Mr Mockler, surprised at this line of talk, accepted the sherry, saying it was good of Dr Friendman. He drank the sherry while Dr Friendman read the letter. When he’d finished, Dr Friendman crossed to the window of the room and pulled aside a curtain and asked Mr Mockler if he’d mind looking out.

There was a courtyard, small and cobbled, in which a gardener was sweeping leaves into a pile. At the far end of it, sitting on a tapestry-backed dining-chair in the autumn sunshine, was a woman in a blue dress. ‘Try these,’ said Dr Friendman and handed Mr Mockler a pair of binoculars.

It was a beautiful face, thin and seeming fragile, with large blue eyes and lips that were now slightly parted, smiling in the sunshine. Hair the colour of corn was simply arranged, hanging on either side of the face and curling in around it. The hair shone in the sunlight, as though it was for ever being brushed.

‘I find them useful,’ Dr Friendman said, taking the binoculars from Mr Mockler’s hands. ‘You have to keep an eye, you know.’

‘That’s Mrs Acland?’ Mr Mockler asked.

‘That’s the lady who wrote to you: the letter’s a bit. inaccurate, Mr Mockler. It wasn’t quite like that in 17 Lorelei Avenue.’

‘Not quite like it?’

‘She cannot forget Lorelei Avenue. I’m afraid she never will. That beautiful woman, Mr Mockler, was a beautiful girl, yet she married the first man who asked her, a widower thirty years older than her, a fat designer of aircraft fasteners. He pays her bills just as she says in her letter, and even when he’s dead they’ll go on being paid. He used to visit her at first, but he found it too painful. He stood in this very room one day, Mr Mockler, and said to Dr Scott-Rowe that no man had ever been appreciated by a woman as much as he had by her. And all because he’d been kind to her in the most ordinary ways.’

Mr Mockler said he was afraid that he didn’t know what Dr Friendman was talking about. As though he hadn’t heard this quiet protest, Dr Friendman smiled and said:

‘But it was, unfortunately, too late for kindness. 17 Lorelei Avenue had done its damage, like a cancer in her mind: she could not forget her childhood.’

‘Yes, she says in her letter. George and Alice and Isabel –’

‘All her childhood, Mr Mockler, her parents did not speak to one another. They didn’t quarrel, they didn’t address each other in any way whatsoever. When she was five they’d come to an agreement: that they should both remain in 17 Lorelei Avenue because neither would ever have agreed to give up an inch of the child they’d between them caused to be born. In the house there was nothing, Mr Mockler, for all her childhood years: nothing except silence.’

‘But there was George and Alice and Isabel –’

‘No, Mr Mockler. There was no George and no Alice and no Isabel. No hide-and-seek or parties on Christmas Eve, no Monopoly on Sundays by the fire. Can you imagine 17 Lorelei Avenue, Mr Mockler, as she is now incapable of imagining it? Two people so cruel to one another that they knew that either of them could be parted from the child in some divorce court. A woman bitterly hating the man whom once she’d loved, and he returning each evening, hurrying back from an office in case his wife and the child were having a conversation. She would sit, Mr Mockler, in a room with them, with the silence heavy in the air, and their hatred for one another. All three of them would sit down to a meal and no one would speak. No other children came to that house, no other people. She used to hide on the way back from school: she’d go down the area steps of other houses and crouch beside dustbins.’

‘Dustbins?’ repeated Mr Mockler, more astonished than ever. ‘Dustbins?’

‘Other children didn’t take to her. She couldn’t talk to them. She’d never learned to talk to anyone. He was a patient man, Mr Acland, when he came along, a good and patient man.’

Mr Mockler said that the child’s parents must have been monsters, but Dr Friendman shook his head. No one was a monster, Dr Friendman said in a professional manner, and in the circumstances Mr Mockler didn’t feel he could argue with him. But the people called Rachels were real, he did point out, as real as the fat designer of aircraft fasteners. Had they left the house, he asked, as it said in the letter? And if they had, what had they been frightened of?

Dr Friendman smiled again. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said, and he explained at great length to Mr Mockler that it was Mrs Acland herself who had frightened the Rachels, turning on a wireless in the middle of the night and running baths and laying tables for people who weren’t there. Mr Mockler listened and was interested to note that Dr Friendman used words that were not easy to understand, and quoted from experts who were in Dr Friendman’s line of business but whose names meant nothing to Mr Mockler.

Mr Mockler, listening to all of it, nodded but was not convinced. The Rachels had left the house, just as the letter said: he knew that, he felt it in his bones and it felt like the truth. The Rachels had been frightened of Mrs Acland’s ghosts even though they’d been artificial ghosts. They’d been real to her, and they’d been real to the Rachels because she’d made them so. Shadows had stepped out of her mind because in her loneliness she’d wished them to. They’d laughed and played, and frightened the Rachels half out of their wits.

‘There’s always an explanation,’ said Dr Friendman.

Mr Mockler nodded, profoundly disagreeing.

‘She’ll think you’re Mr Rachels,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘come to say he saw the ghosts. If you wouldn’t mind saying you did, it keeps her happy.’

‘But it’s the truth,’ Mr Mockler cried with passion in his voice. ‘Of course it’s the truth: there can be ghosts like that, just as there can be in any other way.’

‘Oh, come now,’ murmured Dr Friendman with his sad, humane smile.

Mr Mockler followed. Dr Friendman from the room. They crossed a landing and descended a back staircase, passing near a kitchen in which a chef with a tall chef’s hat was beating pieces of meat. ‘Ah, Wiener schnitzel,’ said Dr Friendman.

In the cobbled courtyard the gardener had finished sweeping up the leaves and was wheeling them away in a wheelbarrow. The woman was still sitting on the tapestry-backed chair, still smiling in the autumn sunshine.

‘Look,’ said Dr Friendman, ‘a visitor.’

The woman rose and went close to Mr Mockler. ‘They didn’t mean to frighten you,’ she said, ‘even though it’s the only way ghosts can communicate. They were only having fun, Mr Rachels.’

‘I think Mr Rachels realizes that now,’ Dr Friendman said.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Mr Mockler.

‘No one ever believed me, and I kept on saying, “When the Rachels come back, they’ll tell the truth about poor George and Alice and Isabel.” You saw them, didn’t you, Mr Rachels?’

‘Yes,’ Mr Mockler said. ‘We saw them.’

She turned and walked away, leaving the tapestry-backed chair behind her.

‘You’re a humane person,’ Dr Friendman said, holding out his right hand, which Mr Mockler shook. The same man led him back through the lawns and the rose-beds, to the gates.

It was an experience that Mr Mockler found impossible to forget. He measured and stitched, and talked to his friends Mr Uprichard and Mr Tile in the Charles the First; he went for a walk morning and evening, and no day passed during which he did not think of the woman whom people looked at through binoculars. Somewhere in England, or at least somewhere in the world, the Rachels were probably still alive, and had Mr Mockler been a younger man he might even have set about looking for them. He would have liked to bring them to the secluded house where the woman now lived, to have been there himself when they told the truth to Dr Friendman. It seemed a sadness, as he once remarked to Mr Uprichard, that on top of everything else a woman’s artificial ghosts should not be honoured, since she had brought them into being and given them life, as other women give children life.

Another Christmas

You always looked back, she thought. You looked back at other years, other Christmas cards arriving, the children younger. There was the year Patrick had cried, disliking the holly she was decorating the living-room with, There was the year Bridget had got a speck of coke in her eye on Christmas Eve and had to be taken to the hospital at Hammersmith in the middle of the night. There was the first year of their marriage, when she and Dermot were still in Waterford. And ever since they’d come to London there was the presence on Christmas Day of their landlord, Mr Joyce, a man whom they had watched becoming elderly.

She was middle-aged now, with touches of grey in her curly dark hair, a woman known for her cheerfulness, running a bit to fat. Her husband was the opposite: thin and seeming ascetic, with more than a hint of the priest in him, a good man. ‘Will we get married, Norah?’ he’d said one night in the Tara Ballroom in Waterford, 6 November 1953. The proposal had astonished her: it was his brother Ned, heavy and fresh-faced, a different kettle of fish altogether, whom she’d been expecting to make it.

Patiently he held a chair for her while she strung paper-chains across the room, from one picture-rail to another. He warned her to be careful about attaching anything to the electric light. He still held the chair while she put sprigs of holly behind the pictures. He was cautious by nature and alarmed by little things, particularly anxious in case she fell off chairs. He’d never mount a chair himself, to put up decorations or anything else: he’d be useless at it in his opinion and it was his opinion that mattered. He’d never been able to do a thing about the house, but it didn’t matter because since the boys had grown up they’d attended to whatever she couldn’t manage herself. You wouldn’t dream of remarking on it: he was the way he was, considerate and thoughtful in what he did do, teetotal, clever, full of fondness for herself and for the family they’d reared, full of respect for her also.

‘Isn’t it remarkable how quick it comes round, Norah?’ he said while he held the chair. ‘Isn’t it no time since last year?’

‘No time at all.’

‘Though a lot happened in the year, Norah.’

‘An awful lot happened.’

Two of the pictures she decorated were scenes of Waterford: the quays and a man driving sheep past the Bank of Ireland. Her mother had given them to her, taking them down from the hall of the farmhouse.

There was a picture of the Virgin and Child, and other, smaller pictures. She placed her last sprig of holly, a piece with berries on it, above the Virgin’s halo.

‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ she said, descending from the chair and smiling at him.

‘A cup of tea’d be great, Norah.’

The living-room, containing three brown armchairs and a table with upright chairs around it, and a sideboard with a television set on it, was crowded by this furniture and seemed even smaller than it was because of the decorations that had been added. On the mantelpiece, above a built-in gas-fire, Christmas cards were arrayed on either side of an ornate green clock.

The house was in a terrace in Fulham. It had always been too small for the family, but now that Patrick and Brendan no longer lived there things were easier. Patrick had married a girl called Pearl six months ago, almost as soon as his period of training with the Midland Bank had ended. Brendan was training in Liverpool, with a firm of computer manufacturers. The three remaining children were still at school, Bridget at the nearby convent, Cathal and Tom at the Sacred Heart Primary. When Patrick and Brendan had moved out the room they’d always shared had become Bridget’s. Until then Bridget had slept in her parents’ room and she’d have to return there this Christmas because Brendan would be back for three nights. Patrick and Pearl would just come for Christmas Day. They’d be going to Pearl’s people, in Croydon, on Boxing Day – St Stephen’s Day, as Norah and Dermot always called it, in the Irish manner.

‘It’ll be great, having them all,’ he said. ‘A family again, Norah.’

‘And Pearl.’

‘She’s part of us now, Norah.’

‘Will you have biscuits with your tea? I have a packet of Nice.’

He said he would, thanking her. He was a meter-reader with North Thames Gas, a position he had held for twenty-one years, ever since he’d emigrated. In Waterford he’d worked as a clerk in the Customs, not earning very much and not much caring for the stuffy, smoke-laden office he shared with half a dozen other clerks. He had come to England because Norah had thought it was a good idea, because she’d always wanted to work in a London shop. She’d been given a job in Dickins & Jones, in the household linens department, and he’d been taken on as a meter-reader, cycling from door to door, remembering the different houses and where the meters were situated in each, being agreeable to householders: all of it suited him from the start. He devoted time to thought while he rode about, and in particular to religious matters.

In her small kitchen she made the tea and carried it on a tray into the living-room. She’d been late this year with the decorations. She always liked to get them up a week in advance because they set the mood, making everyone feel right for Christmas. She’d been busy with stuff for a stall Father Malley had asked her to run for his Christmas Sale. A fashion stall he’d called it, but not quite knowing what he meant she’d just asked people for any old clothes they had, jumble really. Because of the time it had taken she hadn’t had a minute to see to the decorations until this afternoon, two days before Christmas Eve. But that, as it turned out, had been all for the best. Bridget and Cathal and Tom had gone up to Putney to the pictures, Dermot didn’t work on a Monday afternoon: it was convenient that they’d have an hour or two alone together because there was the matter of Mr Joyce to bring up. Not that she wanted to bring it up, but it couldn’t be just left there.

‘The cup that cheers,’ he said, breaking a biscuit in half. Deliberately she put off raising the subject she had in mind. She watched him nibbling the biscuit and then dropping three heaped spoons of sugar into his tea and stirring it. He loved tea. The first time he’d taken her out, to the Savoy cinema in Waterford, they’d had tea afterwards in the cinema café and they’d talked about the film and about people they knew. He’d come to live in Waterford from the country, from the farm his brother had inherited, quite close to her father’s farm. He reckoned he’d settled, he told her that night: Waterford wasn’t sensational, but it suited him in a lot of ways. If he hadn’t married her he’d still be there, working eight hours a day in the Customs and not caring for it, yet managing to get by because he had his religion to assist him.

‘Did we get a card from Father Jack yet?’ he inquired, referring to a distant cousin, a priest in Chicago.

‘Not yet. But it’s always on the late side, Father Jack’s. It was February last year.’

She sipped her tea, sitting in one of the other brown armchairs, on the other side of the gas-fire. It was pleasant being there alone with him in the decorated room, the green clock ticking on the mantelpiece, the Christmas cards, dusk gathering outside. She smiled and laughed, taking another biscuit while he lit a cigarette. ‘Isn’t this great?’ she said. ‘A bit of peace for ourselves?’

Solemnly he nodded.

‘Peace comes dropping slow,’ he said, and she knew he was quoting from some book or other. Quite often he said things she didn’t understand. ‘Peace and goodwill,’ he added, and she understood that all right.

He tapped the ash from his cigarette into an ashtray which was kept for his use, beside the gas-fire. All his movements were slow. He was a slow thinker, even though he was clever. He arrived at a conclusion, having thought long and carefully; he balanced everything in his mind. ‘We must think about that, Norah,’ he said that day, twenty-two years ago, when she’d suggested that they should move to England. A week later he’d said that if she really wanted to he’d agree.

They talked about Bridget and Cathal and Tom. When they came in from the cinema they’d only just have time to change their clothes before setting out again for the Christmas party at Bridget’s convent.

‘It’s a big day for them. Let them lie in in the morning, Norah.’

‘They could lie in for ever,’ she said, laughing in case there might seem to be harshness in this recommendation. With Christmas excitement running high, the less she heard from them the better.

‘Did you get Cathal the gadgets he wanted?’

‘Chemistry stuff. A set in a box.’

‘You’re great the way you manage, Norah.’

She denied that. She poured more tea for both of them. She said, as casually as she could:

‘Mr Joyce won’t come. I’m not counting him in for Christmas Day.’

‘He hasn’t failed us yet, Norah.’

‘He won’t come this year.’ She smiled through the gloom at him. ‘I think we’d best warn the children about it.’

‘Where would he go if he didn’t come here? Where’d he get his dinner?’

‘Lyons used to be open in the old days.’

‘He’d never do that.’

‘The Bulrush Café has a turkey dinner advertised. There’s a lot of people go in for that now. If you have a mother doing a job she maybe hasn’t the time for the cooking. They go out to a hotel or a café, three or four pounds a head –’

‘Mr Joyce wouldn’t go to a café. No one could go into a café on their own on Christmas Day.’

‘He won’t come here, dear.’

It had to be said: it was no good just pretending, laying a place for the old man on an assumption that had no basis to it. Mr Joyce would not come because Mr Joyce, last August, had ceased to visit them. Every Friday night he used to come, for a cup of tea and a chat, to watch the nine o’clock news with them. Every Christmas Day he’d brought carefully chosen presents for the children, and chocolates and nuts and cigarettes. He’d given Patrick and Pearl a radio as a wedding present.

‘I think he’ll come all right. I think maybe he hasn’t been too well. God help him, it’s a great age, Norah.’

‘He hasn’t been ill, Dermot.’

Every Friday Mr Joyce had sat there in the third of the brown armchairs, watching the television, his bald head inclined so that his good ear was closer to the screen. He was tallish, rather bent now, frail and bony, with a modest white moustache. In his time he’d been a builder; which was how he had come to own property in Fulham, a self-made man who’d never married. That evening in August he had been quite as usual. Bridget had kissed him good-night because for as long as she could remember she’d always done that when he came on Friday evenings. He’d asked Cathal how he was getting on with his afternoon paper round.

There had never been any difficulties over the house. They considered that he was fair in his dealings with them; they were his tenants and his friends. When it seemed that the Irish had bombed English people to death in Birmingham and Guildford he did not cease to arrive every Friday evening and on Christmas Day. The bombings were discussed after the news, the Tower of London bomb, the bomb in the bus, and all the others. ‘Maniacs,’ Mr Joyce said and nobody contradicted him.

‘He would never forget the children, Norah. Not at Christmas-time.’

His voice addressed her from the shadows. She felt the warmth of the gas-fire reflected in her face and knew if she looked in a mirror she’d see that she was quite flushed. Dermot’s face never reddened. Even though he was nervy, he never displayed emotion. On all occasions his face retained its paleness, his eyes acquired no glimmer of passion. No wife could have a better husband, yet in the matter of Mr Joyce he was so wrong it almost frightened her.

‘Is it tomorrow I call in for the turkey?’ he said.

She nodded, hoping he’d ask her if anything was the matter because as a rule she never just nodded in reply to a question. But he didn’t say anything. He stubbed his cigarette out. He asked if there was another cup of tea in the pot.

‘Dermot, would you take something round to Mr Joyce?’

‘A message, is it?’

‘I have a tartan tie for him.’

‘Wouldn’t you give it to him on the day, Norah? Like you always do.’ He spoke softly, still insisting. She shook her head.

It was all her fault. If she hadn’t said they should go to England, if she hadn’t wanted to work in a London shop, they wouldn’t be caught in the trap they’d made for themselves. Their children spoke with London accents. Patrick and Brendan worked for English firms and would make their homes in England. Patrick had married an English girl. They were Catholics and they had Irish names, yet home for them was not Waterford.

‘Could you make it up with Mr Joyce, Dermot? Could you go round with the tie and say you were sorry?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You know what I mean.’ In spite of herself her voice had acquired a trace of impatience, an edginess that was unusual in it. She did not ever speak to him like that. It was the way she occasionally spoke to the children.

‘What would I say I was sorry for, Norah?’

‘For what you said that night.’ She smiled, calming her agitation. He lit another cigarette, the flame of the match briefly illuminating his face. Nothing had changed in his face. He said:

‘I don’t think Mr Joyce and I had any disagreement, Norah.’

‘I know, Dermot. You didn’t mean anything –’

‘There was no disagreement, girl.’

There had been no disagreement, but on that evening in August something else had happened. On the nine o’clock news there had been a report of another outrage and afterwards, when Dermot had turned the television off, there’d been the familiar comment on it. He couldn’t understand the mentality of people like that, Mr Joyce said yet again, killing just anyone, destroying life for no reason. Dermot had shaken his head over it, she herself had said it was uncivilized. Then Dermot had added that they mustn’t of course forget what the Catholics in the North had suffered. The bombs were a crime but it didn’t do to forget that the crime would not be there if generations of Catholics in the North had not been treated as animals. There’d been a silence then, a difficult kind of silence which she’d broken herself. All that was in the past, she’d said hastily, in a rush, nothing in the past or the present or anywhere else could justify the killing of innocent people. Even so, Dermot had added, it didn’t do to avoid the truth. Mr Joyce had not said anything.

‘I’d say there was no need to go round with the tie, Norah. I’d say he’d make the effort on Christmas Day.’

‘Of course he won’t.’ Her voice was raised, with more than impatience in it now. But her anger was controlled. ‘Of course he won’t come.’

‘It’s a time for goodwill, Norah. Another Christmas: to remind us.’

He spoke slowly, the words prompted by some interpretation of God’s voice in answer to a prayer. She recognized that in his deliberate tone.

‘It isn’t just another Christmas. It’s an awful kind of Christmas. It’s a Christmas to be ashamed, and you’re making it worse, Dermot.’ Her lips were trembling in a way that was uncomfortable. If she tried to calm herself she’d become jittery instead, she might even begin to cry. Mr Joyce had been generous and tactful, she said loudly. It made no difference to Mr Joyce that they were Irish people, that their children went to school with the children of I.R.A. men. Yet his generosity and his tact had been thrown back in his face. Everyone knew that the Catholics in the North had suffered, that generations of injustice had been twisted into the shape of a cause. But you couldn’t say it to an old man who had hardly been outside Fulham in his life. You couldn’t say it because when you did it sounded like an excuse for murder.

‘You have to state the truth, Norah. It’s there to be told.’

‘I never yet cared for a North of Ireland person, Catholic or Protestant. Let them fight it out and not bother us.’

‘You shouldn’t say that, Norah.’

‘It’s more of your truth for you.’

He didn’t reply. There was the gleam of his face for a moment as he drew on his cigarette. In all their married life they had never had a quarrel that was in any way serious, yet she felt herself now in the presence of a seriousness that was too much for her. She had told him that whenever a new bombing took place she prayed it might be the work of the Angry Brigade, or any group that wasn’t Irish. She’d told him that in shops she’d begun to feel embarrassed because of her Waterford accent. He’d said she must have courage, and she realized now that he had drawn on courage himself when he’d made the remark to Mr Joyce. He would have prayed and considered before making it. He would have seen it in the end as his Catholic duty.

‘He thinks you don’t condemn people being killed.’ She spoke quietly even though she felt a wildness inside her. She felt she should be out on the streets, shouting in her Waterford accent, violently stating that the bombers were more despicable with every breath they drew, that hatred and death were all they deserved. She saw herself on Fulham Broadway, haranguing the passers-by, her greying hair blown in the wind, her voice more passionate than it had ever been before. But none of it was the kind of thing she could do because she was not that kind of woman. She hadn’t the courage, any more than she had the courage to urge her anger to explode in their living-room. For all the years of her marriage there had never been the need of such courage before: she was aware of that, but found no consolation in it.

‘I think he’s maybe seen it by now,’ he said. ‘How one thing leads to another.’

She felt insulted by the words. She willed herself the strength to shout, to pour out a torrent of fury at him, hut the strength did not come. Standing up, she stumbled in the gloom and felt a piece of holly under the sole of her shoe. She turned the light on.

‘I’ll pray that Mr Joyce will come,’ he said.

She looked at him, pale and thin, with his priestly face. For the first time since he had asked her to marry him in the Tara Ballroom she did not love him. He was cleverer than she was, yet he seemed half blind. He was good, yet he seemed hard in his goodness, as though he’d be better without it. Up to the very last moment on Christmas Day there would be the pretence that their landlord might arrive, that God would answer a prayer because His truth had been honoured. She considered it hypocrisy, unable to help herself in that opinion.

He talked but she did not listen. He spoke of keeping faith with their own, of being a Catholic. Crime begot crime, he said, God wanted it to be known that one evil led to another. She continued to look at him while he spoke, pretending to listen but wondering instead if in twelve months’ time, when another Christmas came, he would still be cycling from house to house to read gas meters. Or would people have objected, requesting a meter-reader who was not Irish? An objection to a man with an Irish accent was down-to-earth and ordinary. It didn’t belong in the same grand category as crime begetting crime or God wanting something to be known, or in the category of truth and conscience. In the present circumstances the objection would be understandable and fair. It seemed even right that it should be made, for it was a man with an Irish accent in whom the worst had been brought out by the troubles that had come, who was guilty of a cruelty no one would have believed him capable of. Their harmless elderly landlord might die in the course of that same year, a friendship he had valued lost, his last Christmas lonely. Grand though it might seem in one way, all of it was petty.

Once, as a girl, she might have cried, but her contented marriage had caused her to lose that habit. She cleared up the tea things, reflecting that the bombers would be pleased if they could note the victory they’d scored in a living-room in Fulham. And on Christmas Day, when a family sat down to a conventional meal, the victory would be greater. There would be crackers and chatter and excitement, the Queen and the Pope would deliver speeches. Dermot would discuss these Christmas messages with Patrick and Brendan, as he’d discussed them in the past with Mr Joyce. He would be as kind as ever. He would console Bridget and Cathal and Tom by saying that Mr Joyce hadn’t been up to the journey. And whenever she looked at him she would remember the Christmases of the past. She would feel ashamed of him, and of herself.

Broken Homes

‘I really think you’re marvellous,’ the man said.

He was small and plump, with a plump face that had a greyness about it where he shaved; his hair was grey also, falling into a fringe on his forehead. He was untidily dressed, a turtlenecked red jersey beneath a jacket that had a ballpoint pen and a pencil sticking out of the breast pocket. When he stood up his black corduroy trousers developed concertina creases. Nowadays you saw a lot of men like this, Mrs Malby said to herself.

‘We’re trying to help them,’ he said, ‘and of course we’re trying to help you. The policy is to foster a deeper understanding.’ He smiled, displaying small, evenly arranged teeth. ‘Between the generations,’ he added.

‘Well, of course it’s very kind,’ Mrs Malby said.

He shook his head. He sipped the instant coffee she’d made for him and nibbled the edge of a pink wafer biscuit. As if driven by a compulsion, he dipped the biscuit into the coffee. He said:

‘What age actually are you, Mrs Malby?’

‘I’m eighty-seven.’

‘You really are splendid for eighty-seven.’

He went on talking. He said he hoped he’d be as good himself at eighty-seven. He hoped he’d even be in the land of the living. ‘Which I doubt,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Knowing me.’

Mrs Malby didn’t know what he meant by that. She was sure she’d heard him quite correctly, but she could recall nothing he’d previously stated which indicated ill-health. She thought carefully while he continued to sip at his coffee and attend to the mush of biscuit. What he had said suggested that a knowledge of him would cause you to doubt that he’d live to old age. Had he already supplied further knowledge of himself which, due to her slight deafness, she had not heard? If he hadn’t, why had he left everything hanging in the air like that? It was difficult to know how best to react, whether to smile or to display concern.

‘So what I thought,’ he said, ‘was that we could send the kids on Tuesday. Say start the job Tuesday morning, eh, Mrs Malby?’

‘It’s extremely kind of you.’

‘They’re good kids.’

He stood up. He remarked on her two budgerigars and the geraniums on her window-sill. Her sitting-room was as warm as toast, he said; it was freezing outside.

‘It’s just that I wondered,’ she said, having made up her mind to say it, ‘if you could possibly have come to the wrong house?’

‘Wrong? Wrong? You’re Mrs Malby, aren’t you?’ He raised his voice. ‘You’re Mrs Malby, love?’

‘Oh, yes, it’s just that my kitchen isn’t really in need of decoration.’

He nodded. His head moved slowly and when it stopped his dark eyes stared at her from beneath his grey fringe. He said, quite softly, what she’d dreaded he might say: that she hadn’t understood.

‘I’m thinking of the community, Mrs Malby. I’m thinking of you here on your own above a greengrocer’s shop with your two budgies. You can benefit my kids, Mrs Malby; they can benefit you. There’s no charge of any kind whatsoever. Put it like this, Mrs Malby: it’s an experiment in community relations.’ He paused. He reminded her of a picture there’d been in a history book, a long time ago, History with Miss Deacon, a picture of a Roundhead. ‘So you see, Mrs Malby,’ he said, having said something else while he was reminding her of a Roundhead.

‘It’s just that my kitchen is really quite nice.’

‘Let’s have a little look, shall we?’

She led the way. He glanced at the kitchen’s shell-pink walls, and at the white paintwork. It would cost her nearly a hundred pounds to have it done, he said; and then, to her horror, he began all over again, as if she hadn’t heard a thing he’d been saying. He repeated that he was a teacher, from the school called the Tite Comprehensive. He appeared to assume that she wouldn’t know the Tite Comprehensive, but she did: an ugly sprawl of glass-and-concrete buildings, children swinging along the pavements, shouting obscenities. The man repeated what he had said before about these children: that some of them came from broken homes. The ones he wished to send to her on Tuesday morning came from broken homes, which was no joke for them. He felt, he repeated, that we all had a special duty where such children were concerned.

Mrs Malby again agreed that broken homes were to be deplored. It was just, she explained, that she was thinking of the cost of decorating a kitchen which didn’t need decorating. Paint and brushes were expensive, she pointed out.

‘Freshen it over for you,’ the man said, raising his voice. ‘First thing Tuesday, Mrs Malby.’

He went away, and she realized that he hadn’t told her his name. Thinking she might be wrong about that, she went over their encounter in her mind, going back to the moment when her doorbell had sounded. I’m from Tite Comprehensive,’ was what he’d said. No name had been mentioned, of that she was positive.

In her elderliness Mrs Malby liked to be sure of such details. You had to work quite hard sometimes at eighty-seven, straining to hear, concentrating carefully in order to be sure of things. You had to make it clear you understood because people often imagined you didn’t. Communication was what it was called nowadays, rather than conversation.

Mrs Malby was wearing a blue dress with a pattern of darker blue flowers on it. She was a woman who had been tall but had shrunk a little with age and had become slightly bent. Scant white hair crowned a face that was touched with elderly freckling. Large brown eyes, once her most striking feature, were quieter than they had been, tired behind spectacles now. Her husband, Ernest, the owner of the greengrocer’s shop over which she lived, had died five years ago; her two sons, Derek and Roy, had been killed in the same month – June 1942 – in the same desert retreat.

The greengrocer’s shop was unpretentious, in an unpretentious street in Fulham called Catherine Street. The people who owned it now, Jewish people called King, kept an eye on Mrs Malby. They watched for her coming and going and if they missed her one day they’d ring her doorbell to see that she was all right. She had a niece in Ealing who looked in twice a year, and another niece in Islington, who was crippled with arthritis. Once a week Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert came round with Meals on Wheels. A social worker, Miss Tingle, called; and the Reverend Bush called. Men came to read the meters.

In her elderliness, living where she’d lived since her marriage in 1920, Mrs Malby was happy. The tragedy in her life – the death of her sons – was no longer a nightmare, and the time that had passed since her husband’s death had allowed her to come to terms with being on her own. All she wished for was to continue in these same circumstances until she died, and she did not fear death. She did not believe she would be reunited with her sons and her husband, not at least in a specific sense, but she could not believe, either, that she would entirely cease to exist the moment she ceased to breathe. Having thought about death, it seemed likely to Mrs Malby that after it came she’d dream, as in sleep. Heaven and hell were surely no more than flickers of such pleasant dreaming, or flickers of a nightmare from which there was no waking release. No loving omnipotent God, in Mrs Malby’s view, doled out punishments and reward: human conscience, the last survivor, did that. The idea of a God, which had puzzled Mrs Malby for most of her life, made sense when she thought of it in terms like these, when she forgot about the mystic qualities claimed for a Church and for Jesus Christ. Yet fearful of offending the Reverend Bush, she kept such conclusions to herself when he came to see her.

All Mrs Malby dreaded now was becoming senile and being forced to enter the Sunset Home in Richmond, of which the Reverend Bush and Miss Tingle warmly spoke. The thought of a communal existence, surrounded by other elderly people, with sing-songs and card-games, was anathema to her. All her life she had hated anything that smacked of communal jolliness, refusing even to go on coach trips. She loved the house above the green-grocer’s shop. She loved walking down the stairs and out on to the street, nodding at the Kings as she went by the shop, buying birdseed and eggs and fire-lighters, and fresh bread from Bob Skipps, a man of sixty-two whom she’d remembered being born.

The dread of having to leave Catherine Street ordered her life. With all her visitors she was careful, constantly on the lookout for signs in their eyes which might mean they were diagnosing her as senile. It was for this reason that she listened so intently to all that was said to her, that she concentrated, determined to let nothing slip by. It was for this reason that she smiled and endeavoured to appear agreeable and cooperative at all times. She was well aware that it wasn’t going to be up to her to state that she was senile, or to argue that she wasn’t, when the moment came.

After the teacher from Tite Comprehensive School had left, Mrs Malby continued to worry. The visit from this grey-haired man had bewildered her from the start. There was the oddity of his not giving his name, and then the way he’d placed a cigarette in his mouth and had taken it out again, putting it back in the packet. Had he imagined cigarette smoke would offend her? He could have asked, but in fact he hadn’t even referred to the cigarette. Nor had he said where he’d heard about her: he hadn’t mentioned the Reverend Bush, for instance, or Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert, or Miss Tingle. He might have been a customer in the greengrocer’s shop, but he hadn’t given any indication that that was so. Added to which, and most of all, there was the consideration that her kitchen wasn’t in the least in need of attention. She went to look at it again, beginning to wonder if there were things about it she couldn’t see. She went over in her mind what the man had said about community relations. It was difficult to resist men like that, you had to go on repeating yourself and after a while you had to assess if you were sounding senile or not. There was also the consideration that the man was trying to do good, helping children from broken homes.

‘Hi,’ a boy with long blond hair said to her on the Tuesday morning. There were two other boys with him, one with a fuzz of dark curls all round his head, the other red-haired, a greased shock that hung to his shoulders. There was a girl as well, thin and beaky-faced, chewing something. Between them they carried tins of paint, brushes, cloths, a blue plastic bucket and a transistor radio. ‘We come to do your kitchen out,’ the blond boy said. ‘You Mrs Wheeler then?’

‘No, no. I’m Mrs Malby.’

‘That’s right, Billo,’ the girl said. ‘Malby.’

‘I thought he says Wheeler.’

‘Wheeler’s the geyser in the paint shop,’ the fuzzy-haired boy said.

‘Typical Billo,’ the girl said.

She let them in, saying it was very kind of them. She led them to the kitchen, remarking on the way that strictly speaking it wasn’t in need of decoration, as they could see for themselves. She’d been thinking it over, she added: she wondered if they’d just like to wash the walls down, which was a task she found difficult to do herself?

They’d do whatever she wanted, they said, no problem. They put their paint tins on the table. The red-haired boy turned on the radio. ‘Welcome back to Open House’, a cheery voice said and then reminded its listeners that it was the voice of Pete Murray. It said that a record was about to be played for someone in Upminster.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Mrs Malby suggested above the noise of the transistor.

‘Great,’ the blond boy said.

They all wore blue jeans with patches on them. The girl had a T-shirt with the words I Lay Down With Jesus on it. The others wore T-shirts of different colours, the blond boy’s orange, the fuzzy one’s light blue, the red-haired one’s red. Hot Jam-roll a badge on the chest of the blond boy said; Jaws and Bay City Rollers other badges said.

Mrs Malby made them Nescafé while they listened to the music. They lit cigarettes, leaning about against the electric stove and against the edge of the table and against a wall. They didn’t say anything because they were listening. ‘That’s a load of crap,’ the red-haired boy pronounced eventually, and the others agreed. Even so they went on listening. ‘Pete Murray’s crappy,’ the girl said.

Mrs Malby handed them the cups of coffee, drawing their attention to the sugar she’d put out for them on the table, and to the milk. She smiled at the girl. She said again that it was a job she couldn’t manage any more, washing walls.

‘Get that, Billo?’ the fuzzy-haired boy said. ‘Washing walls.’

‘Who loves ya, baby?’ Billo replied.

Mrs Malby closed the kitchen door on them, hoping they wouldn’t take too long because the noise of the transistor was so loud. She listened to it for a quarter of an hour and then she decided to go out and do her shopping.

In Bob Skipps’ she said that four children from the Tite Comprehensive had arrived in her house and were at present washing her kitchen walls. She said it again to the man in the fish shop and the man was surprised. It suddenly occurred to her that of course they couldn’t have done any painting because she hadn’t discussed colours with the teacher. She thought it odd that the teacher hadn’t mentioned colours and wondered what colour the paint tins contained. It worried her a little that all that hadn’t occurred to her before.

‘Hi, Mrs Wheeler,’ the boy called Billo said to her in her hall. He was standing there combing his hair, looking at himself in the mirror of the hall-stand. Music was coming from upstairs.

There were yellowish smears on the stair-carpet, which upset Mrs Malby very much. There were similar smears on the landing carpet. ‘Oh, but please,’ Mrs Malby cried, standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Oh, please, no!’ she cried.

Yellow emulsion paint partially covered the shell-pink of one wall. Some had spilt from the tin on to the black-and-white vinyl of the floor and had been walked through. The boy with fuzzy hair was standing on a draining board applying the same paint to the ceiling. He was the only person in the kitchen.

He smiled at Mrs Malby, looking down at her. ‘Hi, Mrs Wheeler,’ he said.

‘But I said only to wash them,’ she cried.

She felt tired, saying that. The upset of finding the smears on the carpets and of seeing the hideous yellow plastered over the quiet shell-pink had already taken a toll. Her emotional outburst had caused her face and neck to become warm. She felt she’d like to lie down.

‘Eh, Mrs Wheeler?’ The boy smiled at her again, continuing to slap paint on to the ceiling. A lot of it dripped back on top of him, on to the draining board and on to cups and saucers and cutlery, and on to the floor. ‘D’ you fancy the colour, Mrs Wheeler?’ he asked her.

All the time the transistor continued to blare, a voice inexpertly singing, a tuneless twanging. The boy referred to this sound, pointing at the transistor with his paintbrush, saying it was great. Unsteadily she crossed the kitchen and turned the transistor off. ‘Hey, sod it, missus,’ the boy protested angrily.

‘I said to wash the walls. I didn’t even choose that colour.’

The boy, still annoyed because she’d turned off the radio, was gesturing crossly with the brush. There was paint in the fuzz of his hair and on his T-shirt and his face. Every time he moved the brush about paint flew off it. It speckled the windows, and the small dresser, and the electric stove and the taps and the sink.

‘Where’s the sound gone?’ the boy called Billo demanded, coming into the kitchen and going straight to the transistor.

‘I didn’t want the kitchen painted,’ Mrs Malby said again. ‘I told you.’

The singing from the transistor recommenced, louder than before. On the draining board the fuzzy-haired boy began to sway, throwing his body and his head about.

‘Please stop him painting,’ Mrs Malby shouted as shrilly as she could.

‘Here,’ the boy called Billo said, bundling her out on to the landing and closing the kitchen door. ‘Can’t hear myself think in there.’

‘I don’t want it painted.’

‘What’s that, Mrs Wheeler?’

‘My name isn’t Wheeler. I don’t want my kitchen painted. I told you.’

‘Are we in the wrong house? Only we was told –’

‘Will you please wash that paint off?’

‘If we come to the wrong house –’

‘You haven’t come to the wrong house. Please tell that boy to wash off the paint he’s put on.’

‘Did a bloke from the Comp come in to see you, Mrs Wheeler? Fat bloke?’

‘Yes, yes, he did.’

‘Only he give instructions –’

‘Please would you tell that boy?’

‘Whatever you say, Mrs Wheeler.’

‘And wipe up the paint where it’s spilt on the floor. It’s been trampled out, all over my carpets.’

‘No problem, Mrs Wheeler.’

Not wishing to return to the kitchen herself, she ran the hot tap in the bathroom on to the sponge-cloth she kept for cleaning the bath. She found that if she rubbed hard enough at the paint on the stair-carpet and on the landing carpet it began to disappear. But the rubbing tired her. As she put away the sponge-cloth, Mrs Malby had a feeling of not quite knowing what was what. Everything that had happened in the last few hours felt like a dream; it also had the feeling of plays she had seen on television; the one thing it wasn’t like was reality. As she paused in her bathroom, having placed the sponge-cloth on a ledge under the hand-basin, Mrs Malby saw herself standing there, as she often did in a dream: she saw her body hunched within the same blue dress she’d been wearing when the teacher called, and two touches of red in her pale face, and her white hair tidy on her head, and her fingers seeming fragile. In a dream anything could happen next: she might suddenly find herself forty years younger, Derek and Roy might be alive. She might be even younger; Dr Ramsey might be telling her she was pregnant. In a television play it would be different: the children who had come to her house might kill her. What she hoped for from reality was that order would be restored in her kitchen, that all the paint would be washed away from her walls as she had wiped it from her carpets, that the misunderstanding would be over. For an instant she saw herself in her kitchen, making tea for the children, saying it didn’t matter. She even heard herself adding that in a life as long as hers you became used to everything.

She left the bathroom; the blare of the transistor still persisted. She didn’t want to sit in her sitting-room, having to listen to it. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, imagining the coolness there, and the quietness.

‘Hey,’ the girl protested when Mrs Malby opened her bedroom door.

‘Sod off, you guys,’ the boy with the red hair ordered.

They were in her bed. Their clothes were all over the floor. Her two budgerigars were flying about the room. Protruding from sheets and blankets she could see the boy’s naked shoulders and the back of his head. The girl poked her face up from under him. She gazed at Mrs Malby. ‘It’s not them,’ she whispered to the boy. ‘It’s the woman.’

‘Hi there, missus.’ The boy twisted his head round. From the kitchen, still loudly, came the noise of the transistor.

‘Sorry,’ the girl said.

‘Why are they up here? Why have you let my birds out? You’ve no right to behave like this.’

‘We needed sex,’ the girl explained.

The budgerigars were perched on the looking-glass on the dressing-table, beadily surveying the scene.

‘They’re really great, them budgies,’ the boy said.

Mrs Malby stepped through their garments. The budgerigars remained where they were. They fluttered when she seized them but they didn’t offer any resistance. She returned with them to the door.

‘You had no right,’ she began to say to the two in her bed, but her voice had become weak. It quivered into a useless whisper, and once more she thought that what was happening couldn’t be happening. She saw herself again, standing unhappily with the budgerigars.

In her sitting-room she wept. She returned the budgerigars to their cage and sat in an armchair by the window that looked out over Catherine Street. She sat in sunshine, feeling its warmth but not, as she might have done, delighting in it. She wept because she had intensely disliked finding the boy and girl in her bed. Images from the bedroom remained vivid in her mind. On the floor the boy’s boots were heavy and black, composed of leather that did not shine. The girl’s shoes were green, with huge heels and soles. The girl’s underclothes were purple, the boy’s dirty. There’d been an unpleasant smell of sweat in her bedroom.

Mrs Malby waited, her head beginning to ache. She dried away her tears, wiping at her eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. In Catherine Street people passed by on bicycles, girls from the polish factory returning home to lunch, men from the brickworks. People came out of the greengrocer’s with leeks and cabbages in baskets, some carrying paper bags. Watching these people in Catherine Street made her feel better, even though her headache was becoming worse. She felt more composed, and more in control of herself.

‘We’re sorry,’ the girl said again, suddenly appearing, teetering on her clumsy shoes. ‘We didn’t think you’d come up to the bedroom.’

She tried to smile at the girl, but found it hard to do so. She nodded instead.

‘The others put the birds in,’ the girl said. ‘Meant to be a joke, that was.’

She nodded again. She couldn’t see how it could be a joke to take two budgerigars from their cage, but she didn’t say that.

‘We’re getting on with the painting now,’ the girl said. ‘Sorry about that.’

She went away and Mrs Malby continued to watch the people in Catherine Street. The girl had made a mistake when she’d said they were getting on with the painting: what she’d meant was that they were getting on with washing it off. The girl had come straight downstairs to say she was sorry; she hadn’t been told by the boys in the kitchen that the paint had been applied in error. When they’d gone, Mrs Malby said to herself, she’d open her bedroom window wide in order to get rid of the odour of sweat. She’d put clean sheets on her bed.

From the kitchen, above the noise of the transistor, came the clatter of raised voices. There was laughter and a crash, and then louder laughter. Singing began, attaching itself to the singing from the transistor.

She sat for twenty minutes and then she went and knocked on the kitchen door, not wishing to push the door open in case it knocked someone off a chair. There was no reply. She opened the door gingerly.

More yellow paint had been applied. The whole wall around the window was covered with it, and most of the wall behind the sink. Half of the ceiling had it on it; the woodwork that had been white was now a glossy dark blue. All four of the children were working with brushes. A tin of paint had been upset on the floor.

She wept again, standing there watching them, unable to prevent her tears. She felt them running warmly on her cheeks and then becoming cold. It was in this kitchen that she had cried first of all when the two telegrams had come in 1942, believing when the second one arrived that she would never cease to cry. It would have seemed ridiculous at the time, to cry just because her kitchen was all yellow.

They didn’t see her standing there. They went on singing, slapping the paintbrushes back and forth. There’d been neat straight lines where the shell-pink met the white of the woodwork, but now the lines were any old how. The boy with the red hair was applying the dark-blue gloss.

Again the feeling that it wasn’t happening possessed Mrs Malby. She’d had a dream a week ago, a particularly vivid dream in which the Prime Minister had stated on television that the Germans had been invited to invade England since England couldn’t manage to look after herself any more. That dream had been most troublesome because when she’d woken up in the morning she’d thought it was something she’d seen on television, that she’d actually been sitting in her sitting-room the night before listening to the Prime Minister saying that he and the Leader of the Opposition had decided the best for Britain was invasion. After thinking about it, she’d established that of course it hadn’t been true; but even so she’d glanced at the headlines of newspapers when she went out shopping.

‘How d’you fancy it?’ the boy called Billo called out to her, smiling across the kitchen at her, not noticing that she was upset. ‘Neat, Mrs Wheeler?’

She didn’t answer. She went downstairs and walked out of her hall door, into Catherine Street and into the greengrocer’s that had been her husband’s. It never closed in the middle of the day; it never had. She waited and Mr King appeared, wiping his mouth. ‘Well then, Mrs Malby?’ he said.

He was a big man with a well-kept black moustache and Jewish eyes. He didn’t smile much because smiling wasn’t his way, but he was in no way morose, rather the opposite.

‘So what can I do for you?’ he said.

She told him. He shook his head and repeatedly frowned as he listened. His expressive eyes widened. He called his wife.

While the three of them hurried along the pavement to Mrs Malby’s open hall door it seemed to her that the Kings doubted her. She could feel them thinking that she must have got it all wrong, that she’d somehow imagined all this stuff about yellow paint and pop music on a radio, and her birds flying around her bedroom while two children were lying in her bed. She didn’t blame them; she knew exactly how they felt. But when they entered her house the noise from the transistor could at once be heard.

The carpet of the landing was smeared again with the paint. Yellow footprints led to her sitting-room and out again, back to the kitchen.

‘You bloody young hooligans,’ Mr King shouted at them. He snapped the switch on the transistor. He told them to stop applying the paint immediately. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re up to?’ he demanded furiously.

‘We come to paint out the old ma’s kitchen,’ the boy called Billo explained, unruffled by Mr King’s tone. ‘We was carrying out instructions, mister.’

‘So it was instructions to spill the blooming paint all over the floor? So it was instructions to cover the windows with it and every knife and fork in the place? So it was instructions to frighten the life out of a poor woman by messing about in her bedroom?’

‘No one frightens her, mister.’

‘You know what I mean, son.’

Mrs Malby returned with Mrs King and sat in the cubbyhole behind the shop, leaving Mr King to do his best. At three o’clock he arrived back, saying that the children had gone. He telephoned the school and after a delay was put in touch with the teacher who’d been to see Mrs Malby. He made this telephone call in the shop but Mrs Malby could hear him saying that what had happened was a disgrace. ‘A woman of eighty-seven,’ Mr King protested, ‘thrown into a state of misery. There’ll be something to pay on this, you know.’

There was some further discussion on the telephone, and then Mr King replaced the receiver. He put his head into the cubbyhole and announced that the teacher was coming round immediately to inspect the damage. ‘What can I entice you to?’ Mrs Malby heard him asking a customer, and a woman’s voice replied that she needed tomatoes, a cauliflower, potatoes and Bramleys. She heard Mr King telling the woman what had happened, saying that it had wasted two hours of his time.

She drank the sweet milky tea which Mrs King had poured her. She tried not to think of the yellow paint and the dark-blue gloss. She tried not to remember the scene in the bedroom and the smell there’d been, and the new marks that had appeared on her carpets after she’d wiped off the original ones. She wanted to ask Mr King if these marks had been washed out before the paint had had a chance to dry, but she didn’t like to ask this because Mr King had been so kind and it might seem like pressing him.

‘Kids nowadays,’ Mrs King said. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘Birched they should be,’ Mr King said, coming into the cubbyhole and picking up a mug of the milky tea. ‘I’d birch the bottoms off them.’

Someone arrived in the shop, Mr King hastened from the cubbyhole. ‘What can I entice you to, sir?’ Mrs Malby heard him politely inquiring and the voice of the teacher who’d been to see her replied. He said who he was and Mr King wasn’t polite any more. An experience like that, Mr King declared thunderously, could have killed an eighty-seven-year-old stone dead.

Mrs Malby stood up and Mrs King came promptly forward to place a hand under her elbow. They went into the shop like that. ‘Three and a half p,’ Mr King was saying to a woman who’d asked the price of oranges. ‘The larger ones at four.’

Mr King gave the woman four of the smaller size and accepted her money. He called out to a youth who was passing by on a bicycle, about to. start an afternoon paper round. He was a youth who occasionally assisted him on Saturday mornings: Mr King asked him now if he would mind the shop for ten minutes since an emergency had arisen. Just for once, Mr King argued, it wouldn’t matter if the evening papers were a little late.

‘Well, you can’t say they haven’t brightened the place up, Mrs Malby,’ the teacher said in her kitchen. He regarded her from beneath his grey fringe. He touched one of the walls with the tip of a finger. He nodded to himself, appearing to be satisfied.

The painting had been completed, the yellow and the dark-blue gloss. Where the colours met there were untidily jagged lines. All the paint that had been spilt on the floor had been wiped away, but the black-and-white vinyl had become dull and grubby in the process. The paint had also been wiped from the windows and from other surfaces, leaving them smeared. The dresser had been wiped down and was smeary also. The cutlery and the taps and the cups and saucers had all been washed or wiped.

‘Well, you wouldn’t believe it!’ Mrs King exclaimed. She turned to her husband. However had he managed it all? she asked him. ‘You should have seen the place!’ she said to the teacher.

‘It’s just the carpets,’ Mr King said. He led the way from the kitchen to the sitting-room, pointing at the yellow on the landing carpet and on the sitting-room one. ‘The blooming stuff dried,’ he explained, ‘before we could get to it. That’s where compensation comes in.’ He spoke sternly, addressing the teacher. ‘I’d say she has a bob or two owing.’

Mrs King nudged Mrs Malby, drawing attention to the fact that Mr King was doing his best for her. The nudge suggested that all would be well because a sum of money would be paid, possibly even a larger sum than was merited. It suggested also that Mrs Malby in the end might find herself doing rather well.

‘Compensation?’ the teacher said, bending down and scratching at the paint on the sitting-room carpet. ‘I’m afraid compensation’s out of the question.’

‘She’s had her carpets ruined,’ Mr King snapped quickly. ‘This woman’s been put about, you know.’

‘She got her kitchen done free,’ the teacher snapped back at him.

‘They released her pets. They got up to tricks in a bed. You’d no damn right –’

‘These kids come from broken homes, sir. I’ll do my best with your carpets, Mrs Malby.’

‘But what about my kitchen?’ she whispered. She cleared her throat because her whispering could hardly be heard. ‘My kitchen?’ she whispered again.

‘What about it, Mrs Malby?’

‘I didn’t want it painted.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly now.’

The teacher took his jacket off and threw it impatiently on to a chair. He left the sitting-room. Mrs Malby heard him running a tap in the kitchen.

‘It was best to finish the painting, Mrs Malby,’ Mr King said. ‘Otherwise the kitchen would have driven you mad, half done like that. I stood over them till they finished it.’

‘You can’t take paint off, dear,’ Mrs King said, ‘Once it’s on. You’ve done wonders, Leo,’ she said to her husband. ‘Young devils.’

‘We’d best be getting back,’ Mr King said.

‘It’s quite nice, you know,’ his wife added. ‘Your kitchen’s quite cheerful, dear.’

The Kings went away and the teacher rubbed at the yellow on the carpets with her washing-up brush. The landing carpet was marked anyway, he pointed out, poking a finger at the stains left behind by the paint she’d removed herself with the sponge-cloth from the bathroom. She must be delighted with the kitchen, he said.

She knew she mustn’t speak. She’d known she mustn’t when the Kings had been there; she knew she mustn’t now. She might have reminded the Kings that she’d chosen the original colours in the kitchen herself. She might have complained to the man as he rubbed at her carpets that the carpets would never be the same again. She watched him, not saying anything, not wishing to be regarded as a nuisance. The Kings would have considered her a nuisance too, agreeing to let children into her kitchen to paint it and then making a fuss. If she became a nuisance the teacher and the Kings would drift on to the same side, and the Reverend Bush would somehow be on that side also, and Miss Tingle, and even Mrs Grove and Mrs Halbert. They would agree among themselves that what had happened had to do with her elderliness, with her not understanding that children who brought paint into a kitchen were naturally going to use it.

‘I defy anyone to notice that,’ the teacher said, standing up, gesturing at the yellow blurs that remained on her carpets. He put his jacket on. He left the washing-up brush and the bowl of water he’d been using on the floor of her sitting-room. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your cooperation, Mrs Malby.’

She thought of her two sons, Derek and Roy, not knowing quite why she thought of them now. She descended the stairs with the teacher, who was cheerfully talking about community relations. You had to make allowances, he said, for kids like that; you had to try and understand; you couldn’t just walk away.

Quite suddenly she wanted to tell him about Derek and Roy. In the desire to talk about them she imagined their bodies, as she used to in the past, soon after they’d been killed. They lay on desert sand, desert birds swooped down on them. Their four eyes were gone. She wanted to explain to the teacher that they’d been happy, a contented family in Catherine Street, until the war came and smashed everything to pieces. Nothing had been the same afterwards. It hadn’t been easy to continue with nothing to continue for. Each room in the house had contained different memories of the two boys growing up. Cooking and cleaning had seemed pointless. The shop which would have been theirs would have to pass to someone else.

And yet time had soothed the awful double wound. The horror of the emptiness had been lived with, and if having the Kings in the shop now wasn’t the same as having your sons there at least the Kings were kind. Thirty-four years after the destruction of your family you were happy in your elderliness because time had been merciful. She wanted to tell the teacher that also, she didn’t know why, except that in some way it seemed relevant. But she didn’t tell him because it would have been difficult to begin, because in the effort there’d be the danger of seeming senile. Instead she said goodbye, concentrating on that. She said she was sorry, saying it just to show she was aware that she hadn’t made herself clear to the children. Conversation had broken down between the children and herself, she wanted him to know she knew it had.

He nodded vaguely, not listening to her. He was trying to make the world a better place, he said. ‘For kids like that, Mrs Malby. Victims of broken homes.’

Matilda’s England

1. The Tennis Court

Old Mrs Ashburton used to drive about the lanes in a governess cart drawn by a donkey she called Trot. We often met her as we cycled home from school, when my brother and my sister were at the Grammar School and I was still at the village school. Of the three of us I was Mrs Ashburton’s favourite, and I don’t know why that was except that I was the youngest. ‘Hullo, my Matilda,’ Mrs Ashburton would whisper in her throaty, crazysounding way. ‘Matilda,’ she’d repeat, lingering over the name I so disliked, drawing each syllable away from the next. ‘Dear Matilda.’ She was excessively thin, rather tall, and frail-looking. We made allowances for her because she was eighty-one.

Usually when we met her she was looking for wild flowers, or if it was winter or autumn just sitting in her governess cart in some farmer’s gateway, letting the donkey graze the farmer’s grass. In spring she used to root out plants from the hedges with a little trowel. Most of them were weeds, my brother said; and looking back on it now, I realize that it wasn’t for wild flowers, or weeds, or grazing for her donkey that she drove about the lanes. It was in order to meet us cycling back from school.

‘There’s a tennis court at Challacombe Manor,’ she said one day in May, 1939. ‘Any time you ever wanted to play, Dick.’ She stared at my brother with piercing black eyes that were the colour of quality coal. She was eccentric, standing there in a long, very old and bald fur coat, stroking the ears of her donkey while he nibbled a hedge. Her hat was attached to her grey hair by a number of brass hat-pins. The hat was of faded green felt, the hat-pins had quite large knobs at the ends of them, inlaid with pieces of green glass. Green, Mrs Ashburton often remarked, was her favourite colour, and she used to remove these hat-pins to show us the glass additions, emphasizing that they were valueless. Her bald fur coat was valueless also, she assured us, and not even in its heyday would it have fetched more than five pounds. In the same manner she remarked upon her summer hats and dresses, and her shoes, and the governess cart, and the donkey.

‘I mean, Dick,’ she said that day in 1939, ‘it’s not much of a tennis court, but it was once, of course. And there’s a net stacked away in one of the outhouses. And a roller, and a marker. There’s a lawn-mower, too, because naturally you’ll need that.’

‘You mean, we could play on your court, Mrs Ashburton?’ my sister Betty said.

‘Of course I mean that, my dear. That’s just what I mean. You know, before the war we really did have marvellous tennis parties at Challacombe. Everyone came.’

‘Oh, how lovely!’ Betty was fourteen and Dick was a year older, and I was nine. Betty was fair-haired like the rest of us, but much prettier than me. She had very blue eyes and a wide smiling mouth that boys at the Grammar School were always trying to kiss, and a small nose, and freckles. Her hair was smooth and long, the colour of hay. It looked quite startling sometimes, shining in the sunlight. I used to feel proud of Betty and Dick when they came to collect me every afternoon at Mrs Pritchard’s school. Dick was to leave the Grammar School in July, and on the afternoons of that warm May, as Betty and I cycled home with him, we felt sorry that he wouldn’t be there next term. But Dick said he was glad. He was big, as tall as my father, and very shy. He’d begun to smoke, a habit not approved of by my father. On the way home from school we had to stop and go into a ruined cottage so that he could have a Woodbine. He was going to work on the farm; one day the farm would be his.